Assessing life safety by comparing the available safe egress time (ASET) and the required safe egress time (RSET) is a prominent task in performance-based fire safety design. The calculation of a safety margin by subtracting RSET from ASET is a straightforward concept and is easy to understand. However, when the concept was developed, fire and evacuation models only provided punctual information derived from experimental correlations or hand calculations. Nowadays, complex computer models for fire and evacuation dynamics have become state of the art. However, the ASET-RSET concept has not adapted to these developments. While uncertainties related to the model input and the model application are widely recognised, uncertainties emerging from analysing the output only play a subordinate role. Therefore, we introduce a map representation of ASET and RSET. The maps are generated by a spatial evaluation of the quantities used to determine ASET and RSET. Based on that, a difference map is introduced to represent the safety margin throughout the entire domain. Finally, a method is proposed to reduce the high information content of the difference maps to one scalar measure of consequences. This facilitates multivariate or risk-based analysis approaches and thus is able to reduce the uncertainties in performance-based design.

This is a preprint version of the manuscript published in the Fire Safety Journal, which is referenced as DOI: 10.1016/j.firesaf.2020.103154.