With many hours spent on the design process and numerous traffic studies carried out, how confident are you that the recently completed lifts in that major new development are working at their optimum levels of performance?

You’ve assessed the client needs, considered the future-proofing requirements and tested the proposals with the market. Your design work is finalised and put forward as the optimum VT solution. VT contractors may then carry out traffic studies to confirm the design, making assumptions about lift performance, door speeds, acceleration rates, start time delay, dwell times and more – variable criteria used in the simulation, from which results are derived.

Bearing all this in mind, come the day of handover, how confident are you that what has been installed is adjusted to align with the traffic study criteria and capable of delivering the service expected?

Raise this question at the commissioning stage, and as building completion approaches, and you may not be surprised to learn that often the answer is, “Not very”. The set-up criteria is often left to the individual tester’s judgement with little, if any, reference to the original design requirements and as such there is no closing of the circle between design and application.