MFIRE 3.0-NIOSH Brings MFIRE into the 21st Century

摘要

The MFIRE program, developed in the 1970s by the U.S. Bureau of Mines and Michigan Technological University, has been a mainstay in the modeling of ventilation and fire contaminant spread. It is used by U. S. and international companies to simulate fires for planning and response purposes. However, the original programming language and architecture are considered antiquated by current computer standards. Advances in personal computer operating systems have limited the use of the original program. In addition, the original program is not compatible with modern mine ventilation programs that utilize graphical user interface (GUI) methods. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) completed a major redesign and restructuring of MFIRE under NIOSH contract 200-2009-30794. The program was split into a front-end with a simple GUI, and the MFIRE “engine” back-end. The MFIRE program was rewritten as a discrete event simulation library so it can be used to simulate the progress of mine fires over time. MFIRE's outdated programming language was replaced with an object-oriented C++ approach for ease of future maintenance. A key aspect of the redesign was that third-party developers can obtain ventilation network data from the common memory rather than the default MFIRE data output files. Finally, other improvements to MFIRE were made to increase the size of mine networks that can be modeled and improve capture and processing of runtime errors, adding the ability to report results in both imperial and metric measurement units and to utilize more user-friendly names for data structures.