Modelling Fire Escape of Ultra High-Rise Buildings by Elevators

During Elevcon ’96 held in Barcelona (So 1996), a paper that summarised the issues related to using elevators for fire escape was presented. Lots of technical and psychological problems were discussed in that paper. In order to strengthen the idea to bring it to reality in the next century, a conceptual lift evacuation model was proposed. This model can be used to quantitatively evaluate the evacuation patterns of people using elevators for fire escape. Inside this model, all technical difficulties have been ignored and it is assumed that the hardware is able to resist the fire attack. It is hoped that engineers around the world will devote more time in studying this issue as buildings are getting higher and higher. Eventually, fire escape by elevators may be unavoidable.