Publications / 2024 Proceedings of the 41st ISARC, Lille, France
Historic buildings face multi-faceted fire risks that threaten their conservation. A comprehensive fire risk assessment is essential to prevent fires and protect cultural heritage. Conventional practices rely on surveys and site visits, which are inefficient in capturing up-to-date information digitally and analyzing the risk levels quantitatively. This paper proposes a framework integrating Historic Building Information Models (HBIM) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to enable automated, data-driven fire risk assessment of historic buildings. The framework consists of two key phases: quantitative fire risk modeling and automated risk assessment. The risk modeling defines unified indicators in accordance with fire safety regulations to quantify the risks exposed to the heritage buildings internally and externally. Both inherent building characteristics (e.g. fire resistance rating) and external spatial characteristics (e.g. adjacent access and spatial separation) were assessed. Next, the automated assessment utilizes HBIM and GIS to extract building and surrounding area information, compute the quantitative risks, and develop an interactive visualization platform to facilitate stakeholders in decision-making. The feasibility of this framework is verified through a case study of Mandarins House in Macau. The results indicated the framework is capable of quantifying the risk related to fire-resistant materials (0.66), external access (0.75) and separation (0.76). The results demonstrate that the proposed framework could contribute a unified fire risk model quantification method and a BIM and GIS-combined mechanism for automated risk assessment to support the proactive conservation of valuable cultural heritage assets.