A Pilot Case Study of a Performance-Based Fire Safety Design Method to a Multi-Tenant Office Building.

Abstract

A pilot case study was carried out to examine the feasibility of a performance based fire safety design system to be developed in Japan. This system intends to give more degree of freedom in fire safety design than the method prescribed in current building standards law of Japan. In place of prescriptive solutions, a hierarchy of objectives/ functional requirements/ performance requirements was defined by a pair of design fire condition (input) and acceptable conditions (output). The critical values were selected so that the current prescriptive requirement would satisfy the criteria without too much redundancy. In this way, the system can derive many alternative design solutions without changing the absolute level of safety. As a first pilot case study, the system was applied to an four-storied multi-tenant office buildings. The study was carried out for control of fire spread and life safety verification.