Developing a Fire Resilience Assessment Methodology for the Built Environment

Fire events can have catastrophic consequences for people, properties, businesses and the environment. Buildings that are fire resilient minimise the disruptions caused by a fire event and ensure that normal operations can be resumed as rapidly as possible. Current building regulations do not explicitly consider resilience and it is, therefore, often ignored during building design.

This project will create a methodology to assess, categorise, and identify improvements to, buildings based on their resilience to fire events. The goal of this project is to provide the research to support this methodology. The project will have three phases:
• Phase 1. Capture and refine (or propose) an overarching framework for the Fire Resilience Assessment Methodology. This will be conducted by undertaking consultation with BRE and associated stakeholder groups.
• Phase 2. Conduct a gap analysis of the areas of knowledge required to support and implement the overarching framework. This will be conducted using an exemplar project/building and allow areas of future research to be identified.
• Phase 3. Investigate the most critical knowledge areas required to support the implementation of the Fire Resilience Assessment Method. The topic of this research will depend on the outcome of phase 2, and will likely focus on the development of fundamental knowledge and data generation.

Once the scope and the potential implementation approach have been established, the student will conduct an exemplar analysis (i.e. a stress test) of the methodology to identify and improve the implementation procedures, and identify where current knowledge is insufficient to deliver the fidelity of analysis required. The student will then conduct subsequent targeted research to improve this knowledge base, and generate the necessary information and proof of concept evidence to successfully implement the methodology.