Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A fire risk analysis method based on the use of time-dependent event trees is presented. To concretize the method, a simple example case, a property-loss risk analysis for a fire in a one-storey industrial hall, is presented. The method incorporates explicitly the time dependence of the fire and its consequences. This is achieved so that the fire incident is divided to time intervals and the events within each time interval are analyzed with a separate event tree. The event trees form the basic structure of the analysis and it is shown here how to connect them to a description of the evolution of the fire. This description can be expressed as a stochastic Markov process and it is shown how to link the branching probabilities of the event trees to the transfer matrices of the Markov chain.