Uncertainty-based decision-making in fire safety: Analyzing the alternatives

Abstract

Large accidents throughout the 20 th century marked the development of safety fields in engineering, devoted to better identify hazards, understand risks and properly manage them. While many such fields evolved rather quickly and moved from a compliance to a risk-based approach, Fire Safety Engineering (FSE) experienced a significant delay in this transition. While the current performance-based approach to FSE provides flexibility and capitalizes on learning from accidental events and other engineering disciplines, FSE is still in many respects decades behind other safety fields and a key issue for the future is how FSE can account for uncertainty in the decision making process. This work provides an overview of the main alternatives to account for uncertainty in safety studies within the context of FSE, including traditional probabilistic analyses and emerging approaches such as strength of knowledge. An example is used to illustrate the impact of the uncertainty analysis on the results of a simplified fire safety assessment. A structured evaluation is performed on each alternative to assess its ease of implementation and communication. The outcome is a compendium of advantages and disadvantages of the alternatives that constitute a toolbox for fire safety engineers to configure and use within their fire risk assessments. Process safety engineers are expected to gain an understanding of the similar and important challenges of FSE, it being directly relevant for process risk management and fire risk management in administrative buildings.

Repeat Fire Tests of Upholstered Furniture: Variability and Experimental Observations

“…Alternatively, one could use time and HRR data seen in Fig. 8 input distributions for probabilistic analysis or as bounds for structural design optimization (e.g., [49][50][51]). The development of large data sets for other fire safety experiments (e.g., compartment fires, ceiling jets, heat fluxes from fires) would therefore better capture the relevant bounds of certainty for such optimization techniques.…”

Overviews of Uncertainty: Concepts, Categories and Coping Strategies in Decision Making

“…Ambiguity in this context means that there exist multiple frames of reference about given phenomena. Epistemic Uncertainty can be reduced by further research and empirical investigation or new theories based on experimental observation [30].…”

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The analysis of the operational process of a complex fire alarm system used in transport facilities

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