Elevator Evacuation Algorithms

Abstract

In emergency situations, the practice has been to return elevators to the exit discharge level, and then shut down. After that, the elevators are not available for the building occupants until the emergency is over. In this paper, we study the use of the elevators in an emergency evacuation. We first introduce the theoretical egress time and the handling capacity calculation for an elevator group, which is based on floor-by-floor evacuation. We also describe a specialized elevator evacuation algorithm, which automatically, with or without landing call information, dispatches elevators to the occupied floors and shuttles passengers to the rescue level. The algorithm serves floors in a priority order and detects floor occupancy automatically. We compare this algorithm to a normal algorithm and to two staircases in evacuation. For that purpose, we run simulations of test buildings with realistic transport arrangements and obtain performance measures such as crowding levels of the lobbies, passenger service times and total evacuation time. On this basis, we propose the best algorithm for different types of emergencies.