The driving control of the elevator permanent magnet traction machine needs to obtain the mechanical angle of the rotor in real time. How to accurately detect the rotor position during the starting and operation phases of the traction machine is a key issue to be solved. Aiming at this problem, this paper proposes a composite rotor position detection scheme combining absolute and incremental detection based on sincos composite encoder. Firstly, based on analyzing the principle of absolute and incremental rotor position detection, two rotor position detection algorithms are optimized to improve the rotor position detection accuracy. Then, combining with the rotor maximum vector control strategy, the motor starting and operation scheme is proposed under the rotor position composite detection scheme. Finally, the simulation and experiment results show that the proposed rotor position composite detection scheme can ensure the normal and stable operation of the motor.