This book applies a behavioral point of view to individuals’ fire safety in historic buildings. It outlines theoretical and operative issues, based on recent studies and international guidelines. Firstly, critical issues for Building Heritage fire safety are widely discussed, by including the modelling of human factor and man-environment-fire interference in these architectural spaces. A significant part of the book includes a discussion on emergency modeling and simulation. A source code for representing the fire evacuation process (including man-evacuation facilities interactions) is offered to the reader. Methods for effectiveness assessment of risk-reducing solutions are provided and tested in a case-study. Being a structured approach to occupants-related problems during a fire in heritage buildings, it offers an innovative methodology and practical examples that researchers and designers can use as a guide when proposing and testing solutions. Evaluation indexes for effectiveness assessment (also useful for future guidelines or handbooks) are included. Readers are encouraged to understand these indexes within the proposed approach, so as to extend their applications and possibilities of how to introduce human behaviors-based solutions in other fields. Lastly, attention is focused on the proposal and evaluation of low-impact and not-invasive strategies, such as ones based on wayfinding elements. From this point of view, the pros and cons of wayfinding systems are discussed: these are important today, especially for fire-safety designers, because of the ongoing innovations in this field.

Fire Safety Design for Tall Buildings provides structural engineers, architects, and students with a systematic introduction to fire safety design for tall buildings based on current analysis methods, design guidelines, and codes. It covers almost all aspects of fire safety design that an engineer or an architect might encounter—such as performance-based design and the basic principles of fire development and heat transfer. It also sets out an effective way of preventing the progressive collapse of a building in fire, and it demonstrates 3D modeling techniques to perform structural fire analysis with examples that replicate real fire incidents such as the Twin Towers and WTC7. This helps readers to understand the design of structures and analyze their behavior in fire.