A Risk-Based Method of Deriving Design Fires for Evacuation Safety in Buildings

This article presents a risk-based method for building fire safety design. Because the design fire is the most critical aspect of a building fire safety design, this article uses reliability theory to derive design fires from the fire risk acceptance criteria. The fire scenarios are modeled by an event tree, where different fire protection systems are presented as pivotal events. The number of casualties is estimated by the occupant number and the probability that an untenable condition is reached before occupants evacuate to a safe location. Using the probability and consequence of each fire scenario, the expected risk to life is used to integrate the fire risk acceptance criteria into the determination of the target reliability index. A global optimization method is then applied to the reliability index to obtain the design fires for each scenario. A case study was conducted to demonstrate an application of this proposed method.