A simulation approach for ranking of fire safety attributes of existing buildings

A simulation approach for ranking of fire safety attributes of buildings has been developed on the basis of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. The proposed approach can assist fire safety professionals to evaluate the relative weighting of fire safety attributes of a building in the form of a hierarchy of references through a series of pairwise comparisons. It is particularly suitable for manipulating uncertain evaluation, which is dependent on the "quantity" and "quality" of available information. In this article, the priority ranking of each fire safety attribute given by each evaluator and his/her evaluation on each pairwise comparison are combined to construct an approximate probability density distribution. With reference to such a probability density distribution, we can generate evaluation for each pairwise comparison and pairwise comparison matrices. Moreover, statistical significance tests of the difference in the estimated priorities of the decision alternatives will be possible by these repeated measurements. The proposed method is practicality in that it demands limited computation but can still provide useful information, such as confidence of the ranking, for the evaluation process. Implementation of the proposed fire safety ranking evaluation approach for existing buildings can be carried out by experts' judgments or using a computational approach to derive objective evaluation to assist the ranking evaluation of each attribute. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.