A quantified risk-based framework for life safety

The demand of a risk-informed performance-based approach for fire safety is growing in the Netherlands. Various major incidents have initiated the need for an upgrade of fire safety regulations. All major stakeholders involved have noted that the existing regulations are limited and that a risk-based approach should be developed. The discussions on the implementation of such an approach show that fire safety engineers mainly think in fire safety solutions. They know how solutions perform in relation to each other in terms of qualitative risks, but they have difficulty determining how a given solution performs regarding a given quantitative risk criterion. To tackle this discrepancy Van Straalen [1] has worked out a framework for the fire safety goal life safety, which links a quantified risk criterion for life safety with a series of well-defined fire safety criteria for the operative requirements ignition of fire, fire development, evacuation and strength of structures. Those fire safety criteria can be related to generally applied fire safety solutions. With use of the recently developed roadmap by Meacham and Van Straalen [2] a risk criterion for life safety is proposed in this extended abstract and related to the fire safety criteria with use of probabilistic risk analysis (PRA), to be able to calibrate verification methods and fire safety solution given this risk criterion for life safety