Objectives of the 'test bed' environment studies.
The 'test bed' environment studies are designed to ultimately provide guidelines for the FPEs to use the appropriate set of tools while solving a fire safety related issue in the built environment. Guidelines would be established at the conclusion of each 'test bed' environment, gathering information of the different tools used to solve the common engineering questions, how the engineers manage to mix the results from different
As a by-product of the 'test bed' environments, feedback may be given to the tool developers (who we hope will be an active part of the 'test bed' environment studies) in order to develop new models or improve the current ones so to increase the validation domains of their tools to include the ones considered in the 'test bed' environment studies.
The organization of 'Test bed' environments
Each 'test bed' environment is organized in three phases:
- the pre-processing phase,
- the processing phase
- and the post-processing phase.
You can help the community by either joining already defined 'test bed' environments (by looking at the list of ongoing projects ) or setting up a new project. By clicking on either one of these links, you will be given information about the different phases of a 'test bed' environment. Besides, you can look at the different building configurations that are available for a possible new project, create a new project with one of these configurations or propose new building configurations so other engineers can use and set up new 'test bed' environment projects.
Important related texts
The concept behind the 'test bed environments was first introduced by Alberto Alvarez at the 2011 Fire and Evacuation Modeling Technical Conference, hosted by the company Thunderhead Engineering. The paper prepared for this conference is available with this link .
In 2002, Prof. Brian J. Meacham presented the 'test bed' environment during the 9th International Conference on Performance-Based Codes and Fire Safety Design Methods organized by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers.