Risk analysis of fire and evacuation events in the European railway transport network

• Methodology of fire risk analysis is applied in European railway transport network.
• The main risk analysis tool used event trees.
• 172,800 design fire scenarios are defined in a risk matrix and compared with two pre-selected fire scenarios.
• The sensitivity analysis verifies the impact of each event of pre-selected scenario.

According to international and national guidance (ISO 23932 [1] and the Fire Engineering Design Brief (FEDB)), the selection of the design fire scenario (DFS) is one of the major steps of fire safety engineering methodology. Once the DFS is chosen, its fire performance is evaluated through a fire analysis method in order to meet the fire safety objectives. Two DFS have been previously pre-selected by railway fire safety experts, during the Transfeu project, on the basis of their relevance and feedback. The relative fire risk analysis aims to test how valid and representative are the pre-selected DFS. Its method consists in finding a large number of possible fire sequences, from fire start to fire spread, in railway transportation. To identify these events succession, risk analysis tools such as events trees are used. The fire risk analysis result is a matrix of relative occurrence probabilities versus relative severities. The positions of the pre-selected DFS in the matrix are compared with the large number of fire scenarios. The method and results of the fire risk analysis are discussed in this paper. The main result is that the pre-selected DFS have a serious risk. These DFS are then used in a detailed quantitative assessment to predict the impact of fire on people in a train vehicle.