SMARTFIRE: an intelligent CFD-based fire model

This paper describes a project aimed at making Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based fire simulation accessible to members of the fire safety engineering community. Over the past few years, the practise of CFD based fire simulation has begun the transition from the confines of the research laboratory to the desk of the fire safety engineer. To a certain extent, this move has been driven by the demands of performance based building codes. However, while CFD modelling has many benefits over other forms of fire simulation, it requires a great deal of expertise on the user’s part to obtain reasonable simulation results. The project described in this paper, SMARTFIRE, aims to relieve some of this dependence on expertise so that users are less concerned with the details of CFD analysis and can concentrate on results. This aim is achieved by the use of an expert system component as part of the software suite which takes some of the expertise burden away from the user. SMARTFIRE also makes use of the latest developments in CFD technology in order to make the CFD analysis more efficient. This paper describes design considerations of the SMARTFIRE software, emphasising its open architecture, CFD engine and knowledge based systems.

SMARTFIRE: an intelligent CFD based fire model

This paper describes a project aimed at making Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)- based fire simulation accessible to members of the fire safety engineering community. Over the past few years, the practice of CFD-based fire simulation has begun the transition from the confines of the research laboratory to the desk of the fire safety engineer. To a certain extent, this move has been driven by the demands of performance based building codes. However, while CFD modeling has many benefits over other forms of fire simulation, it requires a great deal of expertise on the user’s part to obtain reasonable simulation results. The project described in this paper, SMARTFIRE, aims to relieve some of this dependence on expertise so that users are less concerned with the details of CFD analysis and can concentrate on results. This aim is achieved by the use of an expert system component as part of the software suite which takes some of the expertise burden away from the user. SMARTFIRE also makes use of the latest developments in CFD technology in order to make the CFD analysis more efficient. This paper describes design considerations of the SMARTFIRE software, emphasizing its open architecture, CFD engine and knowledge-based systems.

A blackboard architecture for a hybrid CBR system for scientific software

This paper describes the use of a blackboard architecture for building a hybrid case based reasoning (CBR) system. The Smartfire fire field modelling package has been built using this architecture and includes a CBR component. It allows the integration into the system of qualitative spatial reasoning knowledge from domain experts. The system can be used for the automatic set-up of fire field models. This enables fire safety practitioners who are not expert in modelling techniques to use a fire modelling tool. The paper discusses the integrating powers of the architecture, which is based on a common knowledge representation comprising a metric diagram and place vocabulary and mechanisms for adaptation and conflict resolution built on the Blackboard.