Abstract
In risk-related research of fire safety engineering, metamodels are often applied to approximate the results of complex fire and evacuation simulations. This approximation may cause epistemic uncertainties, and the inherent uncertainties of evacuation simulations may lead to aleatory uncertainties. However, neither the epistemic ‘metamodel uncertainty’ nor the aleatory ‘inherent uncertainty’ have been included in the results of the metamodels for fire safety engineering. For this reason, this paper presents a metamodel that includes metamodel uncertainty and inherent uncertainty in the results of a risk analysis. This metamodel is based on moving least squares; the metamodel uncertainty is derived from the prediction interval. The inherent uncertainty is modelled with an original approach, directly using all replications of evacuation scenarios without the assumption of a specific probability distribution. This generic metamodel was applied on a case study risk analysis of a road tunnel and showed high accuracy. It was found that metamodel uncertainty and inherent uncertainty have clear effects on the results of the risk analysis, which makes their consideration important.
Highlights
In fire safety engineering, risks for occupants are of high concern and continuously investigated in risk analyses
Risks can be expressed as the individual risk, namely the ‘measure of fire risk limited to consequences experienced by an individual and based on the individual’s pattern of life’ and the societal risk as a ‘measure of fire risk combining consequences experienced by every affected individual’, often represented with a risk curve [2] (p. 3f)
The tunnel geometry is very common in Germany and the ventilation corresponds to German legislation; for example, the forced longitudinal ventilation is directed downhill in order to confine the smoke for the period of the evacuation
Summary
Risks for occupants are of high concern and continuously investigated in risk analyses. The risk-related research in fire safety engineering comprises diverse methodologies for the analysis of consequences in many scenarios. In the methodology proposed by Albrecht [3] with reference to Albrecht and Hosser [4], life safety in a community assembly building was quantified with the probability for safe evacuation. The methodology published by De Sanctis and Fontana [6] was applied on the risk- and Life Quality Index-based optimisation of the widths of doors in a retail building. Anderson and Ezekoye [11] carried out an analysis of the community-averaged extent of damages caused by fires in residential buildings of the United States and Yamamoto et al [12] investigated the fire safety of road tunnel users. The risks of road tunnel users have been widely under research, e.g., by Schubert et al [13], and culminated in several European methodologies for risk analysis, such as for Germany [14] and Austria [15]
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