A review of critical fire event library for buildings and safety framework for smart firefighting

Abstract

While occupants are evacuating from the fire scene, firefighters are entering life-threatening environments, exposed to hot and toxic fire smoke and risks of structural failures or collapses. Each year, numerous firefighters lose their lives due to fatal injuries in the line of duty and long-term health problems. Although well-established prescriptive designs for occupant fire safety are available, most codes ignore 'firefighters' safety in complex and life-threatening situations. This paper establishes a framework for smart firefighting operations based on the critical fire events or consequences. It also reviews the major causes of firefighting casualties in the building fire. A library of the critical and precursor fire events is generated to guide the future design of smart firefighting and building fire safety. The influence factors like occupancy type and construction material are also discussed. A decision event tree containing the critical events is proposed for the incident command officer to carry out risk analysis based on real-time information from the fire scene. Using the library of the critical events and building IoT sensor networks, the trained artificial intelligence (AI) models can forecast the dynamic critical events in super real-time, display the future fire scene in the digital twin, and the estimated time and probability of their occurrence. This smart firefighting framework enables a super real-time forecast of future critical fire events, provides the information to firefighters in a language that they understand and improves operational efficiency and safety.