Traffic Studio

Lift traffic analysis & simulation
PCA + ISO 8100-32 · Andy optimiser

What the studio computes, and the standards it cites

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.

Design parameters

Project name
Lift rises in this building
One traffic study report covers all rises in the building — add a rise for each (low-rise, high-rise, shuttle…), like adding groups. Click a rise to edit it; double-click to rename.
Scenario
Destination control only. Minimum waiting time allocates each call to the car that reaches the passenger soonest. Minimum journey time also charges the ride to the destination — the stops the car will make on the way — which is how Elevate's ACA allocates. Waits read a little longer, journeys shorter.
%
Lift rise
One lift rise (group) per scenario — model low-, mid-, high- and sky-rise groups as separate scenarios. The express zone is the floors this rise passes without serving; those floors carry zero population for this rise (served by the lower zones), and the population or NLA you enter is the population this rise serves, spread across its served floors only. Express floors lengthen the round trip but add no population of their own.
floors
m
Population
ppl
%
Total population or NLA is the right input at concept stage, before the stack is known. Switch to population per floor once the stack plan exists. Either way the grade is a band, not a point — read the 10-seed range on the PCA panel, and treat a grade marked marginal as sitting on a threshold.
Lift group
%
Building stack
Map the rise the way the stack plan reads it. Turn on per-floor heights where the lobby, plant or a transfer level is not a typical storey, and per-lift service where lifts are programmed to skip floors or a group is split between tenants. Extra openings let this rise also stop at floors inside its express zone — a tenant wanting to travel high-rise to mid-rise without a second trip — with the floors in between passed unserved. Levels are the real building levels, express zone included.
Kinematics
m/s
m/s²
m/s³
Door & transfer timing
Studio default: doors 2.0 / 3.0 s, transfer per the assessment basis, 0.5 s advance opening, no dwell. Elevate-equivalent: doors 1.50 / 2.20 s, 1.0 s dwell, 1.2 s transfer (0.8 s for destination control in the PCA legs), no advance opening — so the same building can be entered into both tools. Custom reveals every timing field.
Doors & transfer
s
s
s
s
s
Levelling & door dwell — default 0 (efficient modern baseline); set only to model a specific installation's measured timing.
s
s
s
Andy · optimise
Searches practical designs (≤8 cars, speed sized to the rise, standard rated loads) for the scenario's target grade.
Energy & modernisation

Modelling this project's lift & escalator energy too? Continue it in MAPLE Ascent EnergyCalc Studio — the project name carries over.

Open EnergyCalc →
Core & shaft planning

Planning the lift core for this project? Size car, shaft, pit and overhead in MAPLE Ascent Spatial Studio — the project name and rated load carry over.

Open Spatial Studio →

Analytical benchmark — up-peak (conventional control)

CIBSE Guide D round-trip hand calculation for conventional (2-button) control. Destination control has no published hand-calc equivalent — its benefit is shown by simulation below.

PCA office quality grade — lifts (3rd ed. 2019)

Benchmarks per the Property Council of Australia Guide to Office Building Quality, section E (3rd ed. 2019). Method per the published Australian industry consensus: 1-hour runs at the target grade's demand, E3 waits taken from the worst 5-minute period; density 1 person/12 m² NLA, cars ≤ 80% by mass. E2 (ride quality) and E5/E6 (goods lifts) sit outside a traffic study.

Design comparison — conventional vs destination, your scenario

Average wait
—
destination vs conventional
Handling capacity
—
up-peak, saturated · %POP / 5 min
Conventional collectiveDestination dispatch
A
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