Mechanical circulation of people - Specific needs of offices

Since the 1990s, investors, developers, managers and users of office buildings have been paying particular attention to elevator equipment, whose features contribute to both the quality of life and the "efficiency" of those who use them.

In office buildings and in general, traffic flows are steadily increasing and becoming more complex.

For example:

• the quest for better internal and external communication has resulted in more people moving around;

• variable working hours and increased staff mobility mean that peak flows (entry, lunch and exit) are superimposed on heavy inter-floor traffic;

• the presence of several floors requiring catering increases mid-day traffic.

At the same time, more and more account is being taken of the time "wasted" in elevators, and it is often necessary to meet the three a priori antinomic objectives of minimizing elevator congestion while reducing waiting time (real or perceived) and travel time.The emergence of new technologies in the 1980's facilitated the development, for elevators in batteries, of maneuvers other than those with programmable logic, new maneuvers that could better reconcile the reduction of equipment congestion, waiting time and travel time. While maneuvers with programmable logic are still in use, and the corresponding studies can be carried out in accordance with the approach below, the emergence of other methods of managing user calls and elevators in a battery implies different traffic studies. See 3 for details of these differences.

In all cases, the same analysis scheme should be used as in the previous dossier :

• physical description of the building ;

• integration into the urban fabric ;

• destination ;

• population by level.

Now that these points have been determined as precisely as possible, it is time to make some working hypotheses:

• types of activities ;

• activity rhythms.

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