At the situation of a building fire, occupants should usually escape by stairs, but not by elevators. However, in fact in many past fires, not a few people used elevators for their evacuation. On the other hand, the number of people who have difficulty to use stairs becomes larger year by year in high-rise buildings, since the proportion of aged people in the total population has been rapidly increasing and also accessibility of disabled people has been improved recently in Japan. Therefore, the potential demand of elevator use in evacuation has been growing recently especially after the WTC collapse on September 11th, 2001, while evacuation using elevators in case of a fire is still a controversial issue, because the safe operation of daily use elevators is not always secured during evacuation in a fire. In the context of this situation, we developed a simplified model to simulate the multiple elevators operation for calculating evacuation time by elevators and we conducted some case studies with this elevator service model to examine the feasibility and issues of elevator use for evacuation mainly from the viewpoint of its transportation efficiency of occupants rather than fire safety aspects during the operation.
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