Enhancing Building Fire Safety Performance by Reducing Miscommunication and Misconceptions

Building fire safety is driven by regulations and technical building codes, at least as a minimum requirement. As fire protection engineers (FPEs) design fire safety measures based on requirements in the regulations, they are often viewed as the primary agents in ensuring the fire safety of buildings. However, their mission often starts with given building design features, such as interior spatial layout, exterior shape, site plan, and so forth, which are mostly determined by architects. The only exception is where the FPE is invited to assist in the project planning, feasibility and early concept design stages of a project. Regardless, architects also can influence building fire safety performance, whether or not they explicitly acknowledge or understand this. Although architects design buildings within the boundaries of the regulatory requirements, the architect’s focus is often related to the visual and spatial aesthetics of buildings linked to building form and functionality, which are not subject to the regulations. These aesthetics can sometimes compete with fire safety objectives. As such, buildings can be unsafe in certain situations due to unintended effects of building design features on actual fire safety performance. This research describes the relationship between architecturally conceived building design features, design expectations for fire safety systems, and the actual or conceivable fire safety performance of the building. Steps are proposed that FPEs can take to identify and address potentially competing objectives and deliver increased fire safety performance

Conceptual Model Development for Holistic Building Fire Safety Performance Analysis

The evaluation of building performance during fires is a critical step in designing appropriate strategies. Inappropriate or incomplete performance evaluations can mislead fire safety design solutions, which may in turn result in unacceptable loss of life or building damage from fire. While various building fire safety performance evaluation models have been developed, they focus primarily on ‘hard’ characteristics, such as building construction type and fire protection measures. However, ‘soft’ characteristics, such as building design (architectural) features and occupant characteristics, which also significantly influence building fire safety performance, have not been comprehensively taken into account. In the current study, two conceptual performance models: a generic fire response model and an integrated characteristic interaction model, have been developed to represent the holistic building fire safety performance considering the effects of both hard and soft characteristics. In these models, various cause-effect relationships among building, people, and fire characteristics are identified at the different levels of detail. Based on the conceptual models, a quantitative model utilizing the parameter ranking method and weighted sum method, which are commonly used in analytical hierarchy process, is proposed as a tool to help evaluate building fire safety performance and to assist decision making process of developing fire safety design solutions

Sustainability and resiliency objectives in performance building regulations

<p>Building regulatory agencies worldwide are grappling with how to define and implement appropriate mandatory and voluntary measures for new and existing buildings that address societal and political demands for increased environmental and resource sustainability and resiliency to the effects of climate change without lessening the historical building regulatory focus on health, safety and welfare of building occupants. It can be argued that a transition from prescriptive to performance-based building regulatory regimes, coupled with the introduction of new policy objectives for sustainability and resiliency, in a rather short period of time, without full assessment of how they interact with existing building regulatory objectives, and without broadly agreed holistic solutions, has led to the introduction of new objectives that have the potential to result in increased hazards and risks to occupants. To explore the current situation and future needs associated with performance building regulatory regimes and the inclusion of sustainability and resiliency objectives for new and existing buildings, the literature was reviewed and a survey of building regulatory bodies and institutions in 12 countries was conducted to obtain perspectives on whether and how sustainability and resiliency objectives are being incorporated into their building regulations and if any challenges have been identified.</p

A holistic framework for development and assessment of risk-informed performance-based building regulation

Fire safety provisions in building regulation are about managing risk. In order to appropriately characterize and incorporate risk measures into building regulation, it is helpful to view building regulatory systems (BRS) as complex socio-technical systems (STS), wherein there are interactions between institutions, technology and people, which ideally work together to mitigate risk to a societally tolerable level. A description of BRS as STS and how to assess the efficacy of the BRS in managing fire risk is presented. To illustrate how STS concepts can be used to evaluate and restructure a functional- or performance-based BRS, STS concepts are applied to the evaluation of the building regulatory system in England

A socio-technical system framework for risk-informed performance-based building regulation

<p>Building regulatory systems have been evolving in recent decades, first with a transition to a functional or performance basis, and more recently with the introduction of new societal objectives, including those related to sustainability and climate change resiliency. Various policy and technical challenges have been identified with this evolution, including the lack of a common basis for establishing performance expectations, quantified performance metrics, and robust mechanisms to incorporate new objectives in a manner that effectively integrates a diversity of stakeholder input and results in regulatory requirements that do not compete with long-standing objectives. Among the mechanisms being explored to facilitate a managed evolution is the use of risk as a basis for performance, and modifications within the building regulatory environment to enable this. It is posited that framing the building regulatory system as a socio-technical system (STS) will highlight the complex interactions that exist between regulators and the market, the roles stakeholders play in characterizing risk for use in building regulation, and what steps are required to shift to a risk-informed performance-based building regulatory system, taking into account different legal structures and regulatory approaches that exist between jurisdictions.</p