Encouraging the Use of Risk Concepts in Performance-Based Building and Fire Regulation Development

美国现行建筑和消防法规的目的是在建筑物的设计、建造和使用过程中提供可接受的安全、健康和福利水平。 然而，目前的法规，其规定的措施，数百页，没有提供明确的指示，他们打算实现的安全水平。为解决这一问题，可在规章中纳入反映可接受安全水平的具体目标和目的。 此外，由于建筑和消防条例旨在满足公众对风险管理的要求，这些目标和目的最好应基于社会可接受或可容忍的风险水平。 为了解决这些问题，需要建立一个机制，以便更好地了解火灾和自然灾害对人和财产造成的风险，并更好地解决建筑监管系统内的风险。 美国国家科学基金会/私营部门联合倡议的目标是为建筑和消防法规的制定者概述一个过程，该过程将有助于识别、描述和将风险概念和分析方法纳入建筑和消防法规。 在实现这一目标，这项工作将审查使用的风险概念在广泛的法规，审查各种方法来识别和表征风险问题，确定火灾风险问题的建筑和消防规范，并概述了一个过程，识别，表征，并将风险概念和分析方法纳入性能为基础的建筑和消防规范的发展。 这项研究将提高对火灾和自然灾害风险和相关成本的理解，解决不确定性对基于风险的建筑和消防法规的制定和使用的影响（重点是新技术的应用和与未来人类行为有关的不确定性），帮助规范和标准制定者查看，理解，并将建筑和消防法规的发展作为风险问题来处理，并为进一步开发基于风险和可靠性的建筑和消防安全设计分析和设计工具提供基础。 信息，例子，和决策过程，将从这方面的努力将是一个有价值的补充，以风险为基础的决策领域。 此外，通过重点关注建筑和消防法规制定方面的风险问题，将为建筑和消防界的私营部门伙伴提供一个工具，帮助他们更好地评估和解决火灾和自然灾害的技术风险，更好地理解与风险决策有关的价值问题，如风险认识和成本效益影响，并更好地将这些概念纳入监管发展过程。 最终，这一努力的成果将鼓励改变建筑和消防法规，更好地解决火灾和自然灾害对人员和财产造成的风险，从而使建筑物更安全，火灾和自然灾害造成的损失更少。

The intent of current building and fire regulations used in the United States is to provide an acceptable level of safety, health, and welfare during the design, construction and use of buildings. However, the current regulations, with their hundreds of pages of prescribed measures, do not provide explicit indications of the level of safety they are intended to achieve. To address this concern, specific goals and objectives, reflecting acceptable levels of safety, could be incorporated into the regulations. Furthermore, as building and fire regulations are intended to satisfy the public mandate for managing risks, these goals and objectives should ideally be based on the level(s) of risk acceptable or tolerable to society. To address these concerns, a mechanism is needed to obtain a better understanding of the risks to people and property from fire and natural hazards, and to better address the risks within the building regulatory system. The objective of this Joint NSF / Private Sector Initiative effort is to outline a process for developers of building and fire regulations that will aid in the identification, characterization, and incorporation of risk concepts and analysis methods into building and fire regulations. In meeting this objective, this effort will review the use of risk concepts over a broad range of regulations, review various approaches to identifying and characterizing risk problems, identify fire risk issues in building and fire codes, and outline a process for identifying, characterizing, and incorporating risk concepts and analysis methods into performance-based building and fire code development. This research will improve the understanding of risks and associated costs from fire and natural hazards, address the impact of uncertainty on the development and use of risk-based building and fire regulations (with a focus in the areas of application of new technologies and indeterminate uncertainty related to future human actions), assist codes and standards developers view, understand, and address building and fire regulation development as risk issues, and provide a basis for further development of risk- and reliability-based analysis and design tools for building and fire safety design. The information, examples, and decision-making process that will result from this effort will be a valuable addition to the area of risk-based decision making. Furthermore, by focusing on risk issues in building and fire regulation development, the private sector partners from the building and fire communities will be provided with a tool to help them better assess and address the technical risks from fire and natural hazards, to better understand values issues associated with risk decisions, such as risk perception and cost-benefit implications, and to better incorporate these concepts into the regulatory development process. Ultimately, the product of this effort will encourage changes to the building and fire regulations that will better address the risks to people and property from fire and natural hazards, resulting in safer buildings and fewer losses from fire and natural hazards.