5 research outputs found
Spatial layout planning in sub-surface rail station design for effective fire evacuation
The London Underground network is a crucial part of the transportation system in one of only four ‘Alpha’ world cities. The other three – Paris, New York and Tokyo – also have such sub-surface railway transport systems that may benefit from this shape grammar station design process in a future research proposal. In London’s case, the passenger flow rates are the underlining factor in sizing infrastructure where passengers have access – it is therefore this criterion that provides the basis for the shape grammar formulation for the largest, oldest and one of the most complex underground systems in the world. The research aims to improve passenger fire evacuation times, with due cognisance of the growth of numbers using the system, and its present susceptibility to terrorist attacks taken into account. The proposed shape grammar approach will provide for generation of spatial layouts, based upon visual rules of shape recognition, replacement / union, their connectivity and spatial relationships. The paper concentrates on definition and implementation of novel shape grammar design rules that incorporate station planning design knowledge, and in particular also discusses designers’ fire risk assessment approach and related knowledge that is also needed to produce credible station design solutions. Development, to date, of the proposed artificially intelligent CAD environment is also described along with parallel theoretical research. The proposed CAD interface provides familiarity to the designer and avoids incompatibility issues regarding drawing exchange format between various software systems. The shape grammar layouts produced will be tested in SIMULEX, a commercially available evacuation package, and be compared against ‘traditionally’ designed layouts to demonstrate improvements of preliminary ‘reference’ designs, which follow the standard London Underground design process as a later stage of this research
Health care application of quantitative fire risk analysis
Quantitative risk analysis (QRA) is a very powerful tool with which the fire protection engineer systematically can analyze fire safety problems. Risk analysis methods have during the last decades become more common for analyzing fire safety problems. This is partly because of the development of fire simulation tools enabling a quantitative estimation of the consequences. The increased use of risk analysis methods can also be traced back to the development of performance-based regulations and standards [1�“4]. In such regulations and standards the requirement is to verify that the proposed design solution meets the fire safety objectives but they do not necessarily state how this shall be performed. The engineer, therefore, needs some tools by which he or she can structure the relevant problems and transform them to engineering problems that can be solved. Risk analysis is such a structured method