Station Designer has some sophisticated tools for pedflow... but this is overkill for most building types.
OTOH, most buildings will have a lift / elevator for ADA/DDA compliance.... which will need to be sized and selected. The interesting thing is that there is a dynamic relationship between the size of the floorplates/building and their disposition vertically. This would drive the size and number of lifts and their enclosing shafts.
The sizing / planning calcs are becoming more available and would benefit from better links with design apps like OBD. For example, the area and storey info could be extracted automatically quite easily from OBD or OBSD, and used to feed the planning app which could then generate the shaft / car / lift front and machine room elements using OBD's parametric modeling tools.
The calculation process these days is largely automated using apps which seem to be coming down in cost and getting easier to use... but are still problematic as most designers have to go through a third party to access them. This results in a lot of guess work in the early stages of the design that will need to be reworked later. Anyone who has worked on building cores know how disruptive any kind of change will be and the size of the core will always under pressure to maximise net areas.
Most of this book will only be interesting to the lift math guys, but Part A does hammer home the importance of understanding and planning for circulation flows, even when there are no lifts involved. Something that most building designers only have a very sketchy idea about (myself included). Next time you visit a completely undersized entrance lobby or a crowded lift landing, you'll know what happened ;-)
Hi Dominic,
what do you think about Tools like these:
https://aufzug-planer.kone.de/
Thanks... I haven't seen this before. It is quite detailed and does offer exporting the results as dwg / rfa.
But, there is no input for the size of the floorplate (number of users per floor etc) only the no. of floors. This would be OK for some types of buildings where capacity is not an issue.
I am not sure, but one 'hack' would be to drive the inputs in the web page by interpreting the html etc. See this interesting example from Fohlio's Web Clipper, which is a BIM collab tool for interior designers.
The same 'hack' could be used to take the parameters in the analytical tool which is also hosted on a web page... and transfer them across automatically.
Then, all OBD would need to do is reference the dwg or rfa. The trick here is to understand how Kone places the insertion point (hopefully it will do this consistently).
What would be better is if there is a bit of code in OBD that can extract and package the floor area + storey info etc. See Otis' R*vit addon. This could be stored as Item or DGS info to help make the tool manufacturer agnostic. Schindler, Mitsubishi etc all seem to have web-based selection tools.
OTOH, it might be better to build a relationship with an established player like DigiPara, which has a free version of Liftdesigner, which is set up to deal with third-party data. Interesting to note that LD is also set up to produce detailed drawings in dwg format. It would be good to be able to have these exported in the correct orientation in 3d, Hypermodeling-style.
Not sure which 'datapool' inputs like floor areas and storey heights would be stored in LD... and how parameters like shaft dimensions and openings are stored... Should be possible to find out from them, so that OBD can assign and update the necessary Perforators?
It would be good to have some basic steps established between Bentley and DP even if there is no automation code involved. Who knows, this might develop into something more substantial... for Station Designer? I note that DP also does escalators; both lifts and escalators are a big part of any station design.
Equally, links to an analytical tool like Adsimulo will also be very beneficial to designers in the early stages. Often overlooked that before you get to a design there will need to a lot of 'optioneering' involved and reporting to the client etc. Anything to aid and shorten 'analytical modeling' process (like what Legion is doing with pedflow / station layouts) requiring a lot of expensive billable hours would be key productivity boosters.
HS2 tender lists five number suppliers. This will probably be whittled down at some point.