executive summary

- fire risk assessment is a complex specialised knowledge or professional technology

This report will illustrate

- how fire risk assessment methods are used for buildings.
- outlined key issues related to fire risk
- discussion of defining fire risk
- risk characteristics identification, tools and methods for determining hazards and impacts
statement of problem

- cladding is usually composed of thermal insulation material, bonding layer and decorative surface material
- Its fire resistance performance is affected by factors
- the type of material used
- Thickness
- combustion performance
- overall system structure

- However, there are over thousands of residential buildings with combustible claddings in Victoria
- This project will focus on the fire performance of cladding in residential buildings,
- which are mainly divided into two aspects, flammability and fire resistance.
Background & literature review

- From Omidvari, Mansouri, & Nouri in 2020

- Fire risk assessment is the process of evaluating the level of risk posed by a particular building and determining the
appropriate level of mitigation strategies to be implemented. The total number of buildings in Victoria that have
combustible cladding has been identified as over a thousand
- Masoumi, Genderen, & Maleki in 2022
- one of the most significant problems in fire safety is the time lag in the detection of fires. The traditional assessment
methods based on visual inspection and testing of samples often take a long time, which can be contributed by the lack
of accurate and reliable databases
- You, Lin, Wu, Ji, Zhu, Fan in a 2021 research paper
- The state has experienced a number of major fires in buildings with combustible claddings, causing significant damage
and loss of life. The reconstruction of World War II-era buildings in the state of Victoria, Australia, has resulted in over
1,000 buildings being identified with combustible claddings
Background & literature review

- Nuthammachot, & Stratoulias, 2021

- The most significant cause of fire-related loss of life in Victoria is fire. Therefore, the fire risk assessment is the process
of determining the level of fire risk that a building may have. It involves a combination of methods including structural,
building and furnishings assessment

- Tian, Dai, Wang, Zhao, & Shu, 2020

- The traditional methods of fire risk assessment, however, have led to long lead times which have been contributed to by
the lack of integration of machine learning into the assessment process
- Shahriar, Kho, Lee, & Hasim, 2022
- The United States also has a high fire death toll, with over 42,000 people dying in fires in buildings with combustible
cladding between 1975 and 2020.
- Yakubu, Mireku-Gyimah, & Duker, 2020
- The fire risk assessment is a necessary component of building permit applications in Victoria, Australia. The
reconstruction of World War II-era buildings in the state of Victoria, Australia, has resulted in over 1,000 buildings being
identified with combustible claddings
Available Machine Learning Tools

- many machine-learning tools that can be used for fire risk assessment.
- These include neural networks, decision trees, and other prediction models.
- Fire risk assessment is the assessment of fire hazard in a building with the aim to reduce the level of risk to people and
property.

- Traditional methods of fire risk assessment provide a high level of detail and accuracy,
- but require a lot of time, which can be a challenge in addressing the urgent need to mitigate the fire risk.
- Some of the most commonly used machine learning tools in fire risk assessment include machine-learning algorithms
- such as classification and regression trees (CART), neural networks, and decision trees;
- machine-learning libraries such as OpenCV, R, and Python;
- and machine-learning platforms such as IBM Watson and Amazon Web Services.
Need for research

- Fire is one of the most devastating forces on the planet, affecting millions of people and causing billions of dollars in damages
every year.

- This urgent need for assessing the level of risk and adequate mitigation strategies in these buildings requires a long lead time,
which can be contributed to by the lack of traditional assessment methods.
Machine learning as a possible tool

- The use of machine learning in fire risk assessment allows for the utilization of large volumes of data to be analyzed in order to
make predictions and identify patterns.
- Examples of machine learning software
- The Watson AI has been designed to answer questions in a natural language and then generate appropriate answers. It
is a much faster and more accurate answer generator than humans.
- Google Cloud AI support for open-source AI projects and the AI developer community is a huge factor in the adoption.
The main disadvantages of using Google Cloud AI are that it is not available in all regions, and it is more expensive
than AWS's own services.
- Amazon Machine Learning (ML) is a class of computing models used to make data-driven decisions and solve
problems by training a model on large sets of training data and then using it to make predictions on future data.
- One of the disadvantages of Amazon’s ML Platform is that it can only be applied to items that Amazon has
already sold, like books, movies and video games.

- one of the biggest disadvantages of building a machine learning model with the Azure Machine Learning API
- a lot of the machine learning service models are built in the cloud;
Applying machine learning to enable quantitative fire risk assessment

- Machine learning can predict how building cladding behaves in a fire.

- This includes the properties of the composite materials as they burn,
- the cooling rate of the cladding as it burns,
- the impact of fire on the cladding,
- and the evolution of the microstructure of the composite as it burns.
Proposed Methodology

- Traditional assessment of the fire safety of buildings based on the type of construction and the material used to build the
structure
- often takes a long time and may not result in an accurate determination of the level of risk.

- mainly due to the lack of precise and adequate data on the fire safety of buildings and the absence of internationally accepted
testing methods.

- Many buildings in Victoria have combustible claddings, such as gyprock, pressed fibre cement, and render on their exteriors.

- pose a fire risk to their occupants,

- as the flames from a fire can travel along the cladding and spread to the interiors of the building.

- cannot provide a precise assessment and require unreasonable resources to perform which may lead to its impracticality.
Case Study 1
- a townhouse in Preston in April last year

- cause of the fire was believed to be unsafe human causes

- no one was there inside the house and victoria police was on scene to help the firefighters

- Xiong, Bruck, and Ball, 2017

- almost half, around 46% of Australian home fires were due to unsafe human activities.
Case Study 2
- In a house in Glen Iris Melbourne in Jan 2022

- cause of the fire was believed to be the structural integrity

- under-maintained
- safety became a problem

- According to NFPA, 2019,

- There were three categories of home fire reasons:
- unsafe human activities, vacancy and structural integrity.
- Over the period of 2016 to 2019, smoking materials were the major cause of home fire incidents.