Dear Colleagues,

1) Introduction, including scientific background and highlighting the importance of this research area.

We are pleased to invite you to contribute your research relating to a challenging topic in engineering, namely the probabilistic risk assessment in fire protection engineering, to this Special Issue. For several purposes, such as priority ranking of fire protection measures, facility siting of process plants, urban planning, investment decisions of emergency response organizations, an emphasis in training, etc., qualitative risk prediction is important, but not fully satisfactory. Quantifying the occurrence probability of the fire threat and the severity of consequences will help us to make difficult trade-off decisions. Quantification will improve the understanding and will help to provide more confidence in the ranking of options.

So far, there are relatively few published papers that cover this topic. This is in contrast with quantitative risk assessments developed to predict accidents in the processing and other industries or the consequences of events in which hazardous materials are involved. Due to certain inciting incidents, the latter may start to be released or to be initiated while in storage. Release may result in evaporation and in the dispersion of a flammable or toxic cloud. The flammable cloud may end up being ignited, leading to an explosion, which very often start secondary fires. Gas or dust explosions usually also result in fires. Stored reactive chemicals may be brought to self-heating by various mechanisms. In such cases, the decomposition products will be, for the most part, gaseous and hot, so such events may also be accompanied by fires. Consequence analysis focuses mainly on primary fires, but little on secondary ones.

Along with fires caused various possible accidental events, there are also fires that occur due to wrong or careless handling of heating equipment for cooking and repair operations, electric shortcuts, smoking, or other initiation mechanisms. Altogether, there are many possible ways fires can arise.

To limit or mitigate the consequences of fires, a host of protective measures are available: layout, materials, construction, detection and extinguishing provisions, etc. However, the selection of such protective measures is usually based on experience. The measures serve to protect people, who may be threatened by smoke or radiant heat, to evacuate them in time or to give them a chance to escape, as well as to protect assets, and certainly to prevent further expansion of the initial fire. Given any particular event, there may be many different ways to protect the environment with respect to fire. As resources are always finite, this will mean that a selection will have to be made. Not only will the event probability and consequences of the event causing the fire be important in such a decision, but the probability of a certain protection degree will also be a factor. The analysis may offer a ranking of investments to be made and the probable effectiveness of the various possible measures. The latter concerns the probabilistic risk assessment of fire protection engineering, which so far has not been widely accomplished.

2) This Special Issue aims to provide risk analysts with a fire protection engineering background, or rather fire protection engineers with risk assessment training to develop a probabilistic approach in determining the risk of fire and the effect of measures to contain/limit the consequences. The latter may cover a wide range of applications. Originally, the scope of the journal put emphasis on landscape fires, but a probabilistic approach is particularly interesting too for industrial and urban applications.

3) In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. The papers must contain elements of a probabilistic approach and fire protection engineering, but may cover a large variety of applications in industry (onshore and offshore), construction, emergency response, materials, and safety in general.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Forecasting.

Prof. Dr. Hans Pasman
Dr. Qingsheng Wang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• risk assessment
• fire protection
• risk reduction
• measures ranking
• decision making
• fire databases
• evacuation effectiveness