The modeling of fire spread in buildings by Bayesian network

Fire spread modeling is very important to fire safety engineering and to insurance industries involved in fire risk–cost analysis of buildings. In this paper, the Bayesian network is introduced. The directed acyclic graph of a fire spread model is presented. When the fire ignition location is known, the fire spread model based on the Bayesian network from the compartment of fire origin to another compartment can be built, and the probability of fire spread can be calculated by making use of the joint probability distribution of the Bayesian network. A specific application for an office building is presented for a case without sprinkler and one with sprinkler installed.