A risk assessment approach to fire safety ranking of student housing facilities.

摘要

fire safety ranking system is presented to quantify the level of fire safety in student housing facilities. This risk assessment methodology is used to determine the relative importance ranking of the fire safety attributes. Basically, this methodology can be classified into two sequential phases. The first phase consists of selection of most important factors or attributes affecting the fire safety, followed by arrangement of these attributes in a hierarchy, and determining their relative importance (on a scale of 1--5) or weightings through pair-wise comparisons. Initially, twenty five attributes or factors that affect the fire safety in student housing facilities were selected based on the literature review. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) as a decision support tool was utilized to arrange the correlated attributes in a hierarchy and evaluate their relative importance. A survey was conducted to determine weightings and to perform pair-wise comparisons. A panel of experienced experts comprising of six fire safety and two loss prevention professionals was invited to participate in this survey. A sensitivity analysis was performed to analyze the survey responses and to determine the relative importance or the weightings of the attributes. Following the methodology presented the top five attributes are: maximum travel distance, fire alarm/notification system, number of exits, smoke detector/fire detection system and occupant load.;The student housing facilities at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals were selected due to the diversity in design and categorized into four different architectural models. The second phase consists of case studies conducted on these four models to assign scores (on a scale of 1--5) to the attributes through keen observations, and evaluation of the final scores of these models through performing a simple analysis by multiplying the scores of the attributes with their weightings. The result of this analysis presents the ranking of the different models of the student housing facilities, which shows that the rank of Model D facilities is