Risk analysis and fire safety engineering

The paper demonstrates how two quantitative risk analysis (QRA) methods may be used to evaluate the risk to which the occupants of a building may be subjected if a fire breaks out. The methods (standard QRA and extended QRA) differ in terms of how uncertainties in the variables are considered. The extended QRA explicitly considers uncertainty as it is a part of the methodology. The standard QRA has to be complemented with a sensitivity analysis to fully provide insight into the uncertainty inherent in the scenario. Both methods are applied to a calculation example determining the societal risk for a hospital ward. The analyses are performed as Monte Carlo simulations.