Lift engineering is one of those disciplines that most building professionals encounter regularly but few understand in depth. The vertical transportation system is a critical building component — its performance directly affects the occupant experience from the first day of occupancy — yet the technical basis of its design is understood only by a relatively small number of specialists.
At the heart of lift engineering is the discipline of traffic analysis: the study of how passengers arrive at lift lobbies, how lift systems respond to those arrivals, and how the resulting performance metrics can be predicted and optimised at the design stage. Traffic analysis is what separates a lift specification that is grounded in evidence from one that is based on rules of thumb and precedent.
What Traffic Analysis Involves
Lift traffic analysis encompasses several analytical activities that together provide a complete picture of how a proposed lift system will perform in a given building.
The foundational activity is the estimation of the passenger demand that the lift system will need to serve. For an office building, this typically means calculating the peak five-minute demand during the morning and evening busy periods — the number of passengers expected to arrive at the main entry level and travel to their destination floors within a five-minute window. This calculation takes into account the building’s population, its floor distribution, and the arrival and departure patterns associated with the occupancy type.
The performance analysis then models how a proposed lift configuration — a specific number of cars, of given capacity, operating under a defined control regime — will serve this demand. The key output metrics are the average waiting time (the time between a passenger pressing the call button and a car arriving), the average journey time (the total time from pressing the call button to reaching the destination floor), and the handling capacity (the number of passengers the system can transport per five minutes).
AdSimulo traffic analysis software provides both the analytical framework and the simulation engine to perform these calculations at the level of sophistication that modern building design requires — handling the complexity of multi-car systems, varied floor populations, and the statistical variability of real passenger arrival patterns.
Why Traffic Analysis Software Is Necessary for Complex Buildings
For straightforward buildings with regular floor populations and predictable occupancy, simplified analytical methods based on standard formula and lookup tables can provide adequate guidance for lift specification. The standard approach, based on the round trip time method, has been used successfully for decades and remains appropriate for many applications.
The limitation of simplified methods becomes apparent in buildings that depart from the assumptions on which those methods are based. Mixed-use buildings where different parts of the building generate different traffic patterns, high-rise buildings where travel times are long relative to the loading and unloading times, buildings with sky lobbies or transfer floors, and buildings where specific floors generate disproportionate demand all present challenges that simplified methods handle poorly.
For these buildings, specialist traffic analysis software that can model the building’s specific characteristics and generate simulation-based performance estimates is not a luxury but a necessity. The cost of a lift system that was specified on inadequate analysis is not limited to the capital cost of the system itself — it includes the operating cost of a system that cannot serve the building’s demand effectively, and the reputational cost of occupant dissatisfaction that cannot be resolved without significant capital expenditure.
According to CIBSE Guide D4, simulation-based traffic analysis is the recommended approach for complex vertical transportation design problems, and the guide provides detailed methodology for conducting and interpreting simulation studies.
Lift Software as a Platform for Professional Practice
For lift consultants and building services engineers who provide vertical transportation design as a professional service, the software tools they use are a fundamental component of the service quality they deliver. A consultant who uses specialist simulation software rather than manual calculation can offer clients more rigorous analysis, more defensible design recommendations, and more detailed documentation of the design basis.
For engineers seeking traffic analysis software that provides both the analytical rigour of specialist simulation and the usability that allows it to be deployed efficiently in a professional practice context, AdSimulo delivers the combination that modern vertical transportation engineering requires. Contact their team to explore the platform’s capabilities in detail.
The AdSimulo Platform in Practice
AdSimulo is designed for engineers and consultants who need professional-grade lift traffic simulation without the steep learning curve of traditional specialist tools. The platform makes advanced simulation methodology accessible through a streamlined interface that guides users through the process of defining the building, specifying the lift system, running the simulation, and interpreting the results.
The software handles the underlying computational complexity — the Monte Carlo simulation engine, the statistical analysis of results, the production of output reports — allowing users to focus on the engineering decisions rather than the mechanics of the software. This means that rigorous simulation analysis can be incorporated into a standard design workflow without requiring dedicated specialist time for every project.
The platform is cloud-based, meaning no installation is required and results are accessible from any device. Updates are delivered automatically, ensuring that users always have access to the current version of the software and the most recent analytical methods. For practices working across multiple offices or with remote team members, the cloud architecture eliminates the version management and access issues that desktop software creates.
For building professionals ready to adopt simulation-based vertical transportation analysis as a standard part of their practice, AdSimulo offers the starting point. Contact their team today to arrange a demonstration and explore how the platform handles the specific project types your practice works on.
AdSimulo’s track record with lift engineers and building services consultants across multiple markets makes it the platform of choice for practitioners who take vertical transportation analysis seriously.
The investment in rigorous simulation analysis pays for itself many times over — in better specifications, reduced risk, and the professional confidence that comes from grounding design decisions in evidence.