EMA, Amsterdam | High-rise elevators with destination control:

Simpler and faster than ever

Just a little longer and the new EMA (European Medicines Agency) office building will be running at full capacity. Then the building will have some 36,000 visitors a year, all of whom will have to find their way to the conference rooms, laboratories, restaurants or workplaces. Six high-rise elevators with Otis CompassPlus control are at their disposal for this purpose, the most efficient application in the field of destination control.

With nineteen floors and the large numbers of visitors, the item "belifting" was a nice issue. Multiple consultations and elevator simulations were necessary to identify the options for the elevator configurations chosen. In total, there are now ten Gen2 elevators in the building, nine with a lifting capacity of 2,000 kg and one elevator with a lifting capacity of 2,500 kg. Given the diversity of the building - with meeting rooms, laboratories, etc. - elevator speeds vary between 1.0 and 2.5 m/sec.

CompassPlus control

The CompassPlus destination control system allows the user to move quickly through the building. He enters his desired destination on the keypad in the elevator hall, then the keypad display shows which elevator he must go to in order to reach the desired floor. Users with a corresponding destination are assigned the same elevator. When demand is low, CompassPlus automatically puts some elevators on standby; efficient and sustainable.

LEAN plan for the advanced

The elevators were designed, manufactured and installed by Otis. "The consultations with the project team followed each other in rapid succession," says André Wouters, Project Manager New Construction Amsterdam at Otis. "Immediately after that, a very tight planning started. Not your average LEAN planning, but feel free to call it an advanced LEAN plan. Things were not scheduled one after another, but - wherever possible - simultaneously. That required cooperation with virtually all disciplines and frequent consultation to keep things moving in the same direction at all times."

"Now when I walk into the entrance of the convention center and look at the elevators, I am proud.

Central to the building

The concrete elevator shafts were made by the contractor. Otis provided these with 16 tons of auxiliary steel - in horizontal and vertical directions - for the purpose of door attachment, among other things. "We were working in the heart of the building," Wouters explains. "There was a great need for freight elevators, so we built those first. But we were also in the middle of the built-up area, with virtually no room for storage. That meant that all parts had to be delivered just-in-time. So we built the shaft step-by-step."

Great accuracy

Due to the high lifting speeds of the elevators, extreme accuracy for the guideway arrangement was a requirement. "The surrounding construction could not be a fraction out of plumb," Wouters explains. "Our mechanics achieved a top performance with this conductor arrangement. This was possible thanks to the neatly perpendicular shafts installed by Dura Vermeer."

INTENSIVE COLLABORATION

As an elevator builder, Otis is the spider in the web on many projects. But in the construction of the EMA office building, this was more than ever the case. All disciplines were active simultaneously: electricians, mechanics installing partitions and more. "Normally I visit ongoing projects once or twice a week. On this project, I was there every day. Schedules and orders were frequently changed or adjusted, where we had to keep our end goal - to deliver our elevators qualitatively and on time - in mind at all times. Thorough cooperation with all parties was a must. Looking back, we succeeded. The cooperation was challenging at times, but certainly successful."

The deadline was met; on Nov. 15, EMA was able to use the elevators in its new building. "When I now enter the entrance of the convention center and look at the elevators, I am proud of our joint result. It was one of the most challenging jobs of the past period, but definitely one with a fantastic end result."