Literature Review of Performance-Based Fire Codes and Design Environment

Building codes in many countries around the world are shifting from prescriptive-based to performance-based, a move that is due, in part, to the negative aspects of the prescrip tive codes, to economic and social reasons, to advances made in fire science and engineering, to the need for codes to use fire safety engineering principles within the context of their regulations and to the global harmonization of regulation systems. In addition, the performance-based codes approach improves the regulatory environment by establishing clear code objectives and safety criteria and leaving the means of achiev ing these objectives to the designer. Hence, the codes will be more flexible in allowing innovation, more functional, less complex and easier to apply. Another advantage of performance-based codes is that they will permit the incorporation and use of the latest building and fire research, data and models. These models will be used as the tools for measuring the performance of any number of design alternatives against the established safety levels. The optimum design would meet the code safety objectives and the needs of both the designer and the user. The claimed advantages of such a design is that it can provide improved safety and design functionality at reduced costs.This paper presents the results of the literature survey on the efforts to move from the prescriptive building regulations to performance-based regulations. This paper also describes the required steps for developing performance-based codes. The description outlines the set of objectives formulated internationally, the deterministic and probabilistic design criteria for quantifying the desired fire safety objectives, and safety factors that should be applied to the performance criteria to permit the designer to conservatively assess the design and to allow for a smaller margin of error. Finally, some of the existing fire safety design methods are presented along with a brief description of computerized fire tools.