Towards Smart Fire Panels.

摘要

This note is a review of the last 13 years of work that has been done at the former Building and Fire Research Laboratory (BFRL), now the Engineering Laboratory (EL), at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to provide reliable and useful information and tools to firefighters and other first responders when they are called to a large structure incident. Interest in making use of the increasing amounts of information that buildings collect with various sensors dates back to at least 1984 when NIST staff member Harold E. Bud Nelson suggested that there was a wealth of information being collected by buildings to control HVAC and other building systems that could be useful to the fire service. The driving reason behind this interest has been the magnitude of the problem. Fire emergencies annually cause $9.6 B in property losses to 524 000 structural fires and over 100 firefighters are killed and 80 000 injured, yielding a net social cost of between $3B and $16B per year. The magnitude of the potential impact makes the investment of time and resources needed to study the problem a worthwhile investment. Furthermore, as the Internet and building networks become more ubiquitous, as building systems become more intelligent, as wireless and cellular communications cover more area and as computers become more powerful and more portable, the environment becomes more favorable for the smart fire panel to succeed.