Optimum Performance-Based Fire Protection of Cultural Heritage

摘要

The necessity to preserve the authenticity of the buildings of cultural heritage makes in many cases the implementation of the conventional prescriptive codes of fire protection very difficult. In such kind of buildings it is not only the human life that has to be protected, but the building itself as well, and sometimes its contents. The performance-based design is the rational way to find the right balance between preservation and fire safety, since most of the regulations in practice have specific limitations and several drawbacks. The main scope of the present paper is to propose a new procedure for designing the fire protection measures of cultural heritage buildings in a performance-based way. The proposed procedure incorporates the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The three main parameters that are taken into account are the effectiveness of the fire protection system, its cost and the damage that it causes to the building regarding its authenticity and architectural form. The investigation of the relation between the three above parameters, namely the fire safety level, the cost, and the authenticity preservation, is the main concern of this work.