Availability of fire pumping systems under periodic inspection

•It is shown the importance of fire pumping systems installed in buildings.•Fire pumps availability is an important factor to be considered.•Periodic inspections and tests are crucial to identify potential hidden failures.•It is shown how to determine the probability of failure on demand of fire pumps.•It is possible to observe the influence of inspection and test frequency.

Fire pumping systems are often used for firefighting in the majority of buildings, can they be residential, commercial, industrial or any other type. These systems are responsible for the needed water flow and pressure on manual or automatic devices installed for building protection purposes. Thus, it is very important to assure their availability when an undesirable fire event occurs. This paper focuses fire pumping systems' availability when they are submitted to regular periodic inspections or tests. These inspections or tests are performed to observe the system behavior and detect potential hidden failures of some component or subsystem. The methodology proposed in this paper is focused in the first stage on the analysis of the probability of failure on demand of critical equipment and analyzing the probability of success of this important stage. It is also shown the influence of inspection or tests frequency on the desired availability of the fire pumping system.