Abstract
Modern fire safety engineering seeks to ensure buildings are safe from fire by applying optimum levels of fire safety and protection resources without the need to overprotect. Similarly, the principles of sustainability aim to ensure resources are suitably applied to meet social, economic, and environmental objectives. However, there is a mismatch between the actual application of fire safety and the sustainability objectives for buildings, typically caused by the highly prescriptive historical approaches still largely adopted and legislated for in many countries. One solution that is increasingly adopted is the more flexible, “performance-based” fire engineering approach that bases fire safety and protection provisions on the development of key performance objectives, some of which could be influenced by sustainability engineering propositions for buildings, but very often this does not appear to be enough. The proposed new concept prompts separate assessment and scoring of the eight most important fire safety factors, allowing for calculation of the fire strategy risk index (FSRI). By comparing the FSRI of the actual submitted strategy against the baseline strategy, enforcement agencies or other interested stakeholders will have a methodology to determine optimal fire safety solutions for buildings.
Highlights
The method for fire strategy evaluation is originally based on a British fire strategies methodology, composed by combining methods presented by PAS 911 [34] and Bryant [36] with a risk-based method that was developed by Swiss engineer Max Gretener [40] and a fire risk indexing idea [41]
In order to meet this goal, it is deemed necessary to improve the auditability of performance-based fire strategies so they will be accepted by enforcement agencies and by the wider fire community
This paper presents a method for fire strategy evaluation by providing a new, comparative index methodology for the assessment of fire strategies
Summary
The primary aim of fire safety engineering is to assess the building, including its processes and occupancy profiles, and to determine the most effective strategy to limit the consequences of a fire, both directly and indirectly. The whole focus is on rigid designs that help protect building occupants against the ravages of fire, with little concern for other aspects such as the internal and external environment of the building This is naturally at odds with the objectives of sustainability. The Society of Fire Protection Engineers [10] stated that performance-based fire engineering design will become increasingly important in ensuring sustainable building design They recognised the mismatch between fire safety prescription and sustainability issues and pointed out that, in order to quantifiably reduce a building’s resource use, fire engineers need to take into account the resource demands of products necessary to achieve the required fire safety performance. The fire protection industry needs to recognize new materials and products and adapt the fire safety solutions [11,12] (Snyder, 2010, Vecchiarelli, 2014)
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