Sensitivity and Uncertainty Analyses of Human and Organizational Risks in Fire Safety Systems for High-Rise Residential Buildings with Probabilistic T-H-O-Risk Methodology

Abstract

Given that existing fire risk models often ignore human and organizational errors (HOEs) ultimately leading to underestimation of risks by as much as 80%, this study employs a technical-human-organizational risk (T-H-O-Risk) methodology to address knowledge gaps in current state-of-the-art probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) for high-rise residential buildings with the following goals: (1) Develop an improved PRA methodology to address concerns that deterministic, fire engineering approaches significantly underestimate safety levels that lead to inaccurate fire safety levels. (2) Enhance existing fire safety verification methods by incorporating probabilistic risk approach and HOEs for (i) a more inclusive view of risk, and (ii) to overcome the deterministic nature of current verification methods. (3) Perform comprehensive sensitivity and uncertainty analyses to address uncertainties in numerical estimates used in fault tree/event trees, Bayesian network and system dynamics and their propagation in a probabilistic model. (4) Quantification of human and organizational risks for high-rise residential buildings which contributes towards a policy agenda in the direction of a sustainable, risk-based regulatory regime. This research contributes to the development of the next-generation building codes and risk assessment methodologies.