Boosting Traffic Handling Capacity in the A♦DAM Tower

This paper discusses the technical design and traffic handling simulations for the lift system in the transformation of the multifunctional A♦DAM tower in Amsterdam. This former Shell office for 500 employees was refurbished in 2014-2017 for potentially 3,000-5,000 daily users in a dense mix of different (public) functions. It has become an international hotspot for the music & dance industry since. The lift configuration in the tower has been radically redesigned to accommodate this huge increase of traffic (6-10x) through a combination of drastic technical, architectural and organisational measures. This paper presents these initial measures, as well as the traffic simulations that were performed to analyse their effect. It gives an overview of several practical modifications that were made after commissioning in 2017 to optimise traffic handling even further, based on the size and characteristics of the actual traffic and the waiting times that were experienced in practice. The paper includes the results of a recent traffic measurement and the unique origin-destination matrix that was measured from the actual destination control system.