Decision Support Framework for Sustainable and Fire Resilient Buildings (SAFR-B)

Buildings of all types are increasingly becoming complex ‘systems of systems.’ They are subject to evolving societal objectives, new and innovative materials, and in many countries, regulatory ecosystems are having difficulty keeping pace with rapidly changing societal, environmental and technological changes. Two evolving objectives that are stimulating changes to buildings and communities are the desire for a more environmentally sustainable built environment and the need to become more resilient to the many increasingly hazardous impacts of climate change. Unfortunately, in some building designs these objectives are in conflict. As a first step toward a more integrated, holistic tool to aid in the design of sustainable and fire resilient buildings (SAFR-B), this paper develops and applies a first-order decision framework for a midrise apartment building. The SAFR-B framework is built on an analysis of design and regulatory objectives for fire safety and sustainability for buildings, and of risk and decision methods that can support design decisions. It makes use of risk indexing and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP), with initial scoring and weighting of attributes and strategies derived from international experts in the field of fire safety and sustainability through a Delphi process.