A proposed fire safety ranking system for old highrise buildings in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

A Fire Safety Evaluation System for Prioritizing Fire Improvements in Old High-rise Buildings in Hong Kong

“…The system was designed referring to the local codes for fire safety measures [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]12]. Although general fire safety management was included, the FSE checklist did not identify the merits of various approaches in achieving good fire safety management.…”

“…installations, has been proposed to quantify the fire safety level of local old highrise buildings [12]. With the building score obtained through this system, prioritization of works for those buildings which urgently require improvements in fire safety measures can be identified.…”

“…Parameters for assessing the overall fire safety level have been identified in different fire risk assessment models and can be used to determine the fire safety level of old high-rise buildings [12,[17][18][19][20][21]. In Hong Kong, the official code of practice on building management and maintenance includes a fire safety checklist of four aspects: management of smoke doors, management of means of access, maintenance of fire service installations and maintenance of electricity systems.…”

“…In earlier works by others on fire safety ranking systems for nonresidential buildings [11,12,[17][18][19][20], weighting factors for the above Categories were derived to prioritize the improvements. In this study, each item in a specific Category was assumed to be equally important in terms of providing a holistic fire safe environment.…”

On the use of fuzzy synthetic evaluation and optimal classification for computing fire risk ranking of buildings

“…Watts [2] first comprehensively elaborated the fire safety ranking systems. Chow [25] proposed a 10-point safety ranking system to evaluate the fire safety level. The ranking system was designed with reference to the requirements for fire safety in old high-rise non-residential buildings in Hong Kong.…”