Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A cost-effective risk assessment model, CESARE-RISK, is being developed for residential buildings in Australia by the Centre for Environmental Safety and Risk Engineering (CESARE) at Victoria University of Technology (VUT). The model is being further developed with funds provided by the Fire Code Reform Centre Ltd (FCRC), Australia. CESARE has been appointed to lead the development of this model, with support from other Australian research organizations. This work uses the methodology developed by Beck and adopts the expected risk-to-life (ERL) and fire-cost expectation (FCE) parameters to appraise the risk and cost associated with the effects of fires in buildings. CESARERISK is a new model, which builds on previous work undertaken in Australia and elsewhere, has a number of new sub models which include fire spread model, detection and activation model, human behavior model and expected number of deaths models. This paper describes some of the fire scenarios which are a central feature of the CESARE-RISK model.