Smart Safety Design for Firefighting, Evacuation, and Rescue

Fire is a vital threat to both occupants inside the building and firemen during their firefighting and rescue operation. Once a fire occurs, building environment changes rapidly, showing high temperature, toxic gas composition, low luminance and visibility. The occupants in a confined fire environment need to evacuate before reaching untenable conditions. Specific fire safety design of buildings has been required for fire evacuation over the last decades. To design a safe fire evacuation, conventional approaches rely on prescriptive codes or performance-based design. On top of that, with the booming of emerging technologies and thorough understanding of human behavior, smart design is increasingly welcome and applied to evacuation such as artificial intelligence evacuation modelling and real-time guidance systems However, few design considerations are given to firefighters who enter fire scenes and are exposed to more dangerous environment. Considering the firefighting and rescuing of trapped occupants, building fire safety design should include firefighting facilities and exclusive paths following specific codes, and corresponding safe firefighting principles for firefighters’ operation according to principles for evacuation. Similarly, smart design should be applied in firefighting and rescue including automatic firefighting facilities, intelligent early warning systems. Thus, this chapter provides an overview of the fire safety design progress for evacuation, firefighting and rescue using both conventional and smart approaches. Specifically, it introduces smart fire safety design development and discusses their perspectives and challenges.