PERFORMANCE BASED FIRE SAFETY DESIGN STANDARDS AND FSE TOOLS FOR COMPLIANCE VERIFICATION

Traditionally, fire safety measures of buildings in Japan have been controlled almost entirely by the detailed prescriptive provisions stipulated in the building and the fire regulations. Some of them were leaned more or less blindly from overseas countries and others were established by empirical discretions of so-called “fire experts”. Such prescriptive provisions may be convenient in a sense since particular technical competence for fire safety engineering is hardly required for designers nor building officials. On the other hand, a disadvantage is that they tend to resist any incompliance however trivial it may be from the safety point of view, thereby discouraging the use of innovative materials, products, construction technologies or novel designs.