The international FORUM of fire research directors: A position paper on verification and validation of numerical fire models

The international FORUM of Fire research directors periodically takes positions on issues dealing with the direction and implementation of fire research with the potential for significant impact on safety and/or global practices, standards and test methods. This short communication represents the FORUM's position on the validation of numerical fire models. These models are increasingly being used on the fire protection engineering community, and have the potential for a significant impact with the increasing acceptance of performance based fire codes. The FORUM position is to require verification and validation of these models. Activities should include; code verification to identify and reduce coding errors, calculation verification to establish appropriate model usage, and model validation to provide a quantitative assessment of the predictive capabilities of a model. Peer-reviewed documentation of these activities should be published in the open literature. The importance of verification of models for fire phenomenon, and an overview of these activities, are discussed.