A Multidisciplinary Knowledge Transfer Partnership in Development of Lift Simulator

Abstract Lerch Bates Limited are consulting engineers specialising in short range transportation systems for moving people and materials. Projects include the Taipei 101 Financial Centre and the new Burj Dubai Tower, which is the world’s tallest tower, completed in 2008. As the building are becoming more and more complicated, so are the transportation systems in them. Lerch Bates decided to join forces with Kingston University to develop a computer simulation system for lift design. This sys-tem is strategic to the company, not only in terms of its reputation as the world-leading consultant in people transport systems, but also in terms of cost efficiencies realisable both to internal staff and the architect / developer of a given project. This paper addresses the work done within the Knowledge Transfer Partnership for designing building passenger vertical transportation systems. This was a mul-tidisciplinary project, requiring knowledge transfer in the areas of dynamics, con-trol systems, development of dynamic simulation systems and computer graph-ics/visualization. The design and specification of lift systems for large buildings is a very complicated process, with a wide range of variables that need to be evalu-ated in order to design a system that will deliver acceptable performance. Such evaluation is performed with the help of computer simulation software. The lim-ited functionality of the currently existing programs for lift simulation however prompted the project to pursue the development of a new system, suitable for the demands posed by modern building designs and improved control algorithms. The project provided the calculation and simulation modules together with the genera-tion of the visual simulation and building information model