Artificial Intelligence Powered Building Fire Safety Design Analysis

Emerging innovative architectural designs and new material inventions continue challenging building fire safety and calling for new design approaches. This chapter reviews the conventional approaches in building fire safety design and the latest smart design driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. Today, fire engineers play a core while iterative role during the whole design process, including drawing, auditing, reviewing, and approving. Although computer-aided tools help conduct smoke management and evacuation analysis, the current design process is very time-consuming with many repetitive works and inevitable human errors. By training with massive data and past designs, AI can interpret the rules, code and patterns of fire safety design, so make the whole design more automatic and reliable with minimum human intervention. By lowering the overall cost of fire safety design and quickly identifying the design limit, the architectural and structural designs have more flexibility. The authority having jurisdiction can also use the AI tool to accelerate the review and approval process. AI will lead a revolution in building fire safety design and analysis achieving safer and more cost-effective solutions.