Floor Warden Control – a New Concept for Evacuation Lifts

We are introducing the Floor Warden (FW) controlled lift as a new concept for evacuating building occupants with the help of lifts. Existing evacuation lift concepts have the lift controlled either manually, by a member of the Emergency Response Team (ERT) present in the car, or (semi-) automatically supervised by an external third party Building Management System (BMS) and monitoring thus allowing self-evacuation. In the FW concept the lift is also manually controlled by a member of the ERT, but from the floor that will be evacuated, instead of being controlled from inside the car by a dedicated member of ERT. The advantage of this concept is that there is no need to appoint an extra ERT member exclusively for controlling the lift, thus making more efficient use of the ERT organization. On top of that the lift capacity is also used more efficiently, because 100% of the lift capacity is available for occupants that need to be evacuated. Based on this concept, we developed a system that can operate fully independently from external third party building systems, and has its own integrated intercom. It is therefore easy to implement in new or existing buildings. The system that we developed appears to be very simple in use. Details of the concept and its development are discussed in this paper.