A Novel Fire Risk Assessment Approach for Large-Scale Commercial and High-Rise Buildings Based on Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Coupling Revision.

Yijie Wang,Linzao Hou,Ruixiang Zheng,Mian Li

doi:10.3390/ijerph18137187

Abstract

In recent years, much more emphasis than before has been placed on fire safety regulations by the local and central authorities of China, which makes fire risk assessments more important. In this paper we propose a new fire risk assessment approach for large-scale commercial and high-rise buildings that aims to evaluate the performances of their fire safety systems; this should improve the fire risk management and public safety in those buildings. According to the features of large-scale commercial and high-rise buildings, a fire-risk indexing system was built, and based on it we established a scientific fire risk evaluation system. To this end, the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) was used to assign a reasonable weight to each fire risk factor in the evaluation system. In addition, we revised the original scores by analyzing the coupling relationships among the fire risk factors. To validate our system, we selected 11 buildings in Shandong province and collected their fire safety data. Then, we calculated the final scores for the fire safety management of those buildings, and the results show that: (1) our fire risk evaluation system can assign reasonable weights; (2) the proposed evaluation system is comprehensive and has strong interpretability, since it exploits the coupling relationships among the risk factors. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in that it integrates opinions from multiple experts and utilizes coupling relationships among the factors. Further, the feedback from the approach can find not only the weaknesses in fire risk management, but also the potential causes of fires. As a result, the feedback from our assessment can assist the safety chiefs and inspectors with improving fire risk management.

Highlights

Fire is a common risk in our daily lives
We introduce our methodology in the following steps: (1) we first establish a fire-risk indexing system, based on which we can assess the management performance; (2) with the fire-risk indexing system designed, we provide a weight for each factor using the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) method; (3) according to the coupling relationships among the fire risk factors, we integrate those coupling relationships into the fire-risk indexing system and revise the score of each factor by utilizing the quantified coupling extent
All factors are fully relative to the features of large-scale commercial and high-rise buildings based on the national standards on fire safety management, the maintenance reports from third parties and the annual fire management assessment reports

Summary

Introduction

Fire is a common risk in our daily lives. In recent years, the annual average number of fires reported in China has exceeded 100,000, causing more than 2000 deaths and over one billion US dollars in losses each year [1,2]. Fire risk management is very essential for ensuring the safety of people’s lives and property. Among all kinds of buildings, large-scale commercial and high-rise buildings are the most representative ones located in cities with high population densities and are tied closely to economic development and people’s lives. Plenty of laws, regulations and relevant provisions about those two kinds of buildings have been published by the government to regulate the fire safety management of those buildings [3,4]. In order to enhance the fire safety management of those buildings, a well-designed assessment that fully considers the features of those two types of buildings is demanded. A scientific assessment can motivate the safety chiefs of the buildings (the safety chief is the person in charge of fire safety in a building) to improve their fire security systems so as to ensure fast responses to conflagration and to

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion