Although performance-based building regulations are in use or under development in numerous countries worldwide, there remain significant challenges in adequately identifying and defining performance, in understanding and addressing diverse societal expectations, and in establishing robust performance-based regulatory systems. These challenges become intensified as the building construction market becomes increasingly global, with the resulting expectation that building regulatory instruments remain valid across borders and do not create barriers to trade, while at the same time address local and national needs without compromising local cultural and societal norms. Many of these issues are just now beginning to be explored, and there is significant opportunity and need for future research and development in these areas.Bien que les réglementations concernant les bâ timents axés sur la performance soient déjà appliquées ou en cours d'élaboration dans de nombreux pays, de graves difficultés persistent lorsqu'il s'agit de cerner et de définir comme il convient la performance, de comprendre et de répondre aux diverses attentes de la société et d'établir de solides systèmes de réglementation basés sur la performance. Ces difficultés s'accroissent à mesure que le marché du bâ timent se mondialise; il faut alors espérer que les moyens réglementaires propres au secteur du bâ timent seront applicables dans tous les pays, ne feront pas obstacle aux échanges tout en permettant de satisfaire les exigences locales et nationales sans compromettre les normes culturelles et sociétales locales. Pour l'heure, bon nombre de ces questions ne sont qu'effleurées; d'immenses possibilités s'offrent à la recherche et au développement dans ce domaine où les besoins sont nombreux.
The use of emergency backup and storage facilities to supplement existing facilities in response to the potential effects of various natural and anthropogenic hazards (e.g., floods, fires, outages, and acts of malice) can be an effective way of reducing vulnerability and enhancing the resilience of supply chain and other logistics functions. Although there can be additional costs associated with utilizing emergency backup and storage facilities, they can be a particularly attractive and cost-effective alternative in those cases where long-term disruptions can, or should, be expected. In this paper we use set cover location modeling as a decision to determine the number of backup facilities to locate under varying cover, anticover, and complementary anticover distances. We then add the flexibility of allowing existing facilities to serve as backup facilities and explore the interrelationships among hazards, vulnerability, and location. Finally, these model formulations are applied to an example data set over 900 cities and towns in New England and New York. Copyright (c) 2008 Copyright the Authors. Journal compilation (c) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc..
The Notion of Acceptable RiskInvestigation into 'acceptable' risk, particularly as a concept for use in regulation, was triggered by Starr (1969) when he proposed that societal risk acceptability could be determined by reviewing the level(s) of risk that society "accepted" in the past. His 'revealed preference' concept suggested 1) that the public accepts voluntary risks on the order of 1000 times greater than involuntary risks, 2) that statistical risk of death from disease is a psychological yardstick for establishing a level of risk acceptability, 3) that acceptability is proportional to the third power of the benefits, and 4) that social acceptance of risk is influenced by public awareness as determined by advertising, usefulness, and number of people participating. This work triggered interest across a wide range of disciplines, including economics, psychology, sociology, and geography, as well as engineering (e.g.,
Fires are adverse events with tangible costs for property and human life. Quantification of the immediate and direct costs of fire provide a metric for understanding the social and economic impact of fire and for assessing progress in fire prevention and protection. In addition to their physical costs, fires have a range of less immediate and obvious adverse consequences on the natural environment. These include air contamination from the fire plume (whose deposition is likely to subsequently include land and water contamination), contamination from water runoff containing toxic products, and other environmental discharges or releases from burned materials. Current efforts to improve the sustainability of buildings focus on increasing energy efficiency and reducing the embodied carbon. This overlooks the fact that a fire event could reduce the overall sustainability of a building through the release of pollutants and the subsequent re-build. Several pieces of work exist on the quantification of the environmental impact of fire, but there is a need to pull this information together and to identify the technical gaps that still exist. This publication pulls together the project aims, discusses the sources reviewed, presents a framework that was postulated for quantifying the environmental impact of fire, describes the gaps in knowledge, and presents a plan forward. The research resulted in a more in-depth appreciation of the environmental impact of fire, data, tools and methods that might be undertaken to analysis the environmental impacts as part of a fire engineering analysis, and highlights areas where future research is needed.
A review of two decades of worldwide experience using standards, codes and guidelines related to performance-based fire protection design for buildings has identified shortcomings in the interpretation, application and implementation of the performance-based design process, apparent inconsistency in the resulting levels of performance achieved and several opportunities to enhance the process. In a constantly evolving building environment, technical challenges have to be overcome because fire safety engineering still depends greatly on knowledge gained from scientific and engineering research across a broad range of disciplines (e.g., better understanding of the fire phenomena, the behavior and response of the building occupants/contents/structure to the fire, tools for engineering analysis and all the necessary data needed to support tool application). Political challenges also need to be considered as performance-based fire protection design requires the approval of the authority having jurisdiction and other involved stakeholders, at several of its different steps (design, construction, original usage, modifications of usage). The review presented here has been undertaken from an engineering perspective rather than a regulatory perspective. Two key outcomes of this engineering review are that several of the challenges that have been identified are strongly linked to the application of generic guidance to specific problems, which results in critical details being missed, and that some of the engineering issues are treated within a political context, while they should be addressed as purely technical issues.
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