Safety is the state of being "safe", the condition of being protected from harm or other danger. Safety can also refer to the control of recognized hazards in order to achieve an acceptable level of risk.
Fire safety is the set of practices intended to reduce destruction caused by fire. Fire safety measures include those that are intended to prevent the ignition of an uncontrolled fire and those that are used to limit the spread and impact of a fire.
Emergency evacuation is an immediate egress or escape of people away from an area that contains an imminent threat, an ongoing threat or a hazard to lives or property.
Evacuation simulation is a method to determine evacuation times for areas, buildings, or vessels. It is based on the simulation of crowd dynamics and pedestrian motion. The number of evacuation software have been increased dramatically in the last 25 years. A similar trend has been observed in term of the number of scientific papers published on this subject. One of the latest survey indicate the existence of over 70 pedestrian evacuation models. Today there are two conferences dedicated to this subject: "Pedestrian Evacuation Dynamics" and "Human Behavior in Fire".
Fire protection engineering is the application of science and engineering principles to protect people, property, and their environments from the harmful and destructive effects of fire and smoke. It encompasses engineering which focuses on fire detection, suppression and mitigation and fire safety engineering which focuses on human behavior and maintaining a tenable environment for evacuation from a fire. In the United States 'fire protection engineering' is often used to include 'fire safety engineering'.
The Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) is a professional society for fire protection engineering established in 1950 and incorporated as an independent organization in 1971. It is the professional society representing those practicing the field of fire protection engineering. The Society has over 5,000 members and more than 120 chapters and over 20 student chapters worldwide. SFPE also includes the SFPE foundation with the following mission "Enhancing the scientific understanding of fire and its interaction with the social, natural and built environments".
Fire Technology is a peer-reviewed journal publishing scientific research dealing with fire hazards facing humans and the environment. It publishes original contributions, both theoretical and empirical, that contribute to the solution of problems in fire safety and related fields. It is published by Springer in conjunction with the National Fire Protection Association and the Society of Fire Protection Engineers.
Erica Kuligowski is an American social research scientist investigating human behavior during emergencies and the performance of evacuation models in disasters. She currently works at RMIT university in Melbourne (Australia). Kuligowski used to work the Engineering Lab of the National Institute of Standards and Technology conducting research on several fire disasters including the NIST Hurricane Maria Project.
Reza Razavi is an Iranian professor of paediatric cardiovascular science, vice-president and vice-principal of research at the King's College London, the director of research at King's Health Partners, and the director of the King's Wellcome Trust EPSRC Centre For Medical Engineering.
Fred Mannering is an American scientist/engineer who is most known for the development and application of statistical and econometric methods to study highway safety, economics, travel behavior, and a variety of engineering-related problems.
Guillermo Rein is a professor of fire science in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London. His research is focused on fire, combustion, and heat transfer. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Fire Technology and Fellow of the Combustion Institute.
Katrina Groth is an American mechanical engineer and professor. Groth is an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is the associate director for research for the Center for Risk and Reliability and the director of the Systems Risk and Reliability Analysis lab (SyRRA). Groth previously served as the Principal Research & Development Engineer at Sandia National Laboratories.
Juergen Hahn is an American engineering professor. His research focuses on computational systems biology with a specific emphasis on the development of data science approaches and their application to biological pathways relevant to the life sciences.
Ruggiero Lovreglio is an Italian academic based in Auckland, New Zealand. He is an associate professor at Massey University and a Rutherford Discovery Fellow for Royal Society Te Apārangi. His research is focused on large-scale and small-scale evacuation dynamics and safety training using emerging technologies, such as virtual reality and augmented reality.
Mirosław J. Skibniewski is a professor of construction engineering and project management in the A. James Clark School of Engineering of the University of Maryland, College Park. Since 1994, he has been the editor-in-chief of Automation in Construction (Elsevier). He is also a co-editor-in-chief of Frontiers of Engineering Management.
Rita Fahy was an Irish American expert in evacuation modelling and human behaviour in fire. She carried out pioneering work in the field by developing one of the first evacuation models in history and debunking the myths surrounding the panic concept in evacuation. Fahy also made substantial contributions to data collection of human behaviour in fires and ran multiple evacuation investigations, developing one of the first evacuation databases for fire protection engineers. She worked on the NFPA investigation on fatal firefighter injuries in the United States.
Ed Galea is a British academic specialising in fire safety engineering and evacuation dynamics. He is the founding director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG) at the University of Greenwich, where he has conducted pioneering research in fire modelling, human behaviour in emergencies, and evacuation simulation since 1986.
Karina Gibert is a data scientist and researcher at the Technical University of Catalonia. She co-founded the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Center (IDEAI) in 2018 and was made director in 2021.
Daniel Nilsson is a Swedish fire safety engineer and academic, currently serving as a Professor in Fire Engineering at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Nilsson has been a member of the ISO TC 92/SC4, developing standards for fire safety engineering since 2014. Nilsson has made contributions to the field of fire safety through his research, teaching, and leadership in the industry, focusing on evacuation dynamics and debunking the myth of panic. His work focuses on human behaviour in fire, evacuation modelling, and the design of fire safety systems.
Evacuation models are simulation tools designed to predict the movement and behaviour of individuals during an emergency evacuation. These models are today used to simulate evacuations for several disasters, such as building fires, wildfires, hurricanes, and tsunamis. Thes models have been under development since the late 1970s and they are now widely to assess the time required to evacuate buildings, cities or wider regions.
