Integrating Human Factors Issues into Engineered Fire Safety Design

Engineered fire safety design requires considerably more knowledge in a broader spectrum of areas than traditional regulation-based or prescriptive-based fire safety design. In some areas, the required knowledge and expertise may not exist in the fire safety engineering community, and will have to come from specialists outside the profession. One such area is understanding and accounting for human response in fire situations. As perscriptive-based fire safety design does not require detailed consideration of the human/fire interaction, most fire safety engineers are ill equipped to address this consideration in engineered fire safety design. To address this concern, fire safety engineers need to become better aware of human response to fire. In addition, the means to integrate human factors issues into engineered fire safety design need to be developed. This paper helps to address the awareness issue by outlining several human factors issues that fire safety engineers need to consider in their designs. To make the process of addressing human factors issues in engineered fire safety design more systematic and complete, a conceptual approach for integrating human factors into engineered fire safety design is outlined.