Traffic Studio

Traffic Studio sizes a lift group at concept stage, and assesses an existing group against the grade it is expected to meet. Enter the building's population, the floors served and any express zone, then the group's lift count, rated load, rated speed, acceleration, jerk and door times. It returns the four figures a vertical-transportation design is judged on: round-trip time, up-peak interval, handling capacity as a percentage of the population served in five minutes, and passenger waiting time.

Two methods run side by side. The analytical benchmark is a CIBSE Guide D round-trip hand calculation for conventional (two-button) collective control, reporting probable stops, highest reversal and passengers per trip alongside the interval. The simulation is a Monte-Carlo model of the same group across a full traffic profile — up-peak, lunch, down-peak, or a stepped search that raises demand until the group saturates. Destination dispatch is assessed by simulation because it has no published hand-calculation equivalent.

Results are graded against published standards. The Property Council of Australia Guide to Office Building Quality, section E, sets the office grade — car capacity (E1), waiting time (E3) and handling capacity (E4) — for the 2006, 2012 and 2019 editions, with waits taken from the worst five-minute period of a one-hour run and cars loaded to 80% by mass. ISO 8100-32:2020, clauses 8.2 to 8.4, sets the simulation method: constant-demand runs at the required handling capacity and above it, each 120 minutes with the first 15 and last 5 minutes excluded, judged against Table 3. Car occupancy follows the 75 kg passenger mass of EN 81-20 and ISO 8100, or 68 kg per AS 1735.2 for existing installations.

The studio is built for building designers, developers and vertical-transportation consultants who need a defensible answer at concept stage — whether a proposed group meets a target grade, and what to change if it does not. The engine is a clean-room implementation: it is written from the published standards and methods themselves, and every threshold it applies is cited to the document it comes from.

The studio runs in the browser at no charge and without a licence key; the formal traffic study report it produces is a separately priced deliverable. Figures are preliminary and intended for design comparison — confirm them against a licensed copy of each standard before relying on them contractually.