Fire Resilience and Safety Innovations in Buildings

A special issue of Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309). This special issue belongs to the section "Building Energy, Physics, Environment, and Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2026 | Viewed by 1341

Editors


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Guest Editor
Fire Safety Engineering, School of Engineering, Design and Built Environment, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia
Interests: fire safety engineering; fire modelling; material and structure under fire; cladding materials; intumescent coating; sustainable building materials; steel–concrete composite technology; prefabricated composite structures
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Department of Building Environment and Energy Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
Interests: fire modelling; fire materials; flame retardants; computational fluid dynamics; molecular dynamics; battery thermal management; pyrolysis
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Department of Textile Engineering, Dhaka University of Engineering and Technology (DUET), Gazipu 1700, Bangladesh
Interests: fire testing of polymeric and composite materials; fire modelling; framework in fire safety; bushfire; building codes and fire safety compliance

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Fires in buildings continue to be a major global safety concern, particularly as climate change and urban density exacerbate the risk of fire. Additionally, emerging energy sources and technologies introduce new fire hazards that require updated safety approaches. Many traditional fire protection systems are limited in their abilities or are increasingly insufficient to address these evolving hazards. This Special Issue focuses on enhancing fire resilience and safety in buildings by showcasing practical innovations, research advances, and new design approaches.

The primary goal of this Special Issue is to advance the understanding and application of innovative fire resilience and safety strategies in buildings. By encouraging interdisciplinary research, technological development, and policy integration, this Special Issue aims to identify scalable solutions that can reduce fire-related risks, enhance building performance under fire conditions, and improve post-event recovery. Through the collection of original research articles, case studies, and practical insights, this Issue seeks to establish fire safety as a foundational principle of sustainable, intelligent, and adaptive built environments.

A wide range of topics related to fire resilience and safety innovation in buildings, encompassing both established practices and emerging technologies across design, engineering, materials science, and policy domains, are welcome, including but not limited to the following topics:

  1. Advanced fire-resistant construction materials;
  2. Structural integrity under extreme fire conditions;
  3. Fire resilience in sustainable building design;
  4. Passive and active fire protection systems;
  5. Fire safety challenges in high-rise and complex buildings;
  6. Fire-safe architectural design principles;
  7. Fire safety of energy storage systems;
  8. Fire risks from EV parking and micro-mobility (E-bikes) storage in buildings;
  9. IoT-enabled fire safety systems;
  10. AI-driven fire risk prediction and management;
  11. Building Information Modelling (BIM) for fire simulation;
  12. Climate-adaptive fire protection strategies;
  13. Wildfire-resilient urban planning;
  14. Building codes and fire safety compliance;
  15. Performance-based fire safety approaches;
  16. Post-fire assessment and regulatory reform;
  17. Numerical modelling of fire using Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) and Finite Elemental Analysis (FEA);
  18. Computational Modelling Techniques and Framework in Fire Safety;
  19. Actomistic Models for Flame Retardants.

Dr. Md Kamrul Hassan
Dr. Anthony Chun Yin Yuen
Dr. Delwar Hossain
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • fire-resistant materials
  • passive fire protection
  • active fire suppression systems
  • fire safety regulations
  • evacuation planning
  • smoke control systems
  • structural fire resilience
  • building fire codes
  • thermal insulation performance
  • fire detection technology
  • smart fire monitoring
  • AI-based fire prediction
  • IoT in fire safety
  • autonomous evacuation systems
  • post-fire recovery strategies
  • wildland–urban interface fire risk
  • BIM-based fire simulation
  • climate-adaptive fire design
  • resilient infrastructure systems
  • sustainable fire safety engineering
  • electric vehicles parking
  • 2D flame retardants
  • MXene
  • CFD
  • MD

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

37 pages, 11397 KB  
Article
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)-Enabled Probabilistic Fire Risk Prediction for High-Rise Residential Buildings: SHAP Attribution of Human and Organisational Risks
by Samson Tan, Teoh Teik Toe, Paul Joseph and Khalid Moinuddin
Buildings 2026, 16(13), 2538; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings16132538 - 26 Jun 2026
Viewed by 267
Abstract
Fire safety in high-rise residential buildings depends on active fire protection systems subject to technical, human, and organisational risks. Prior probabilistic models incorporating human and organisational errors (HOEs) raise expected risk-to-life by 20 to 37%, yet remain inaccessible to the owners, managers, qualified [...] Read more.
Fire safety in high-rise residential buildings depends on active fire protection systems subject to technical, human, and organisational risks. Prior probabilistic models incorporating human and organisational errors (HOEs) raise expected risk-to-life by 20 to 37%, yet remain inaccessible to the owners, managers, qualified persons, and regulators who must act on them. This paper applies SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) to a reconstructed Bayesian network fire risk model with Markov Chain Monte Carlo uncertainty propagation, extending the T-H-O-Risk methodology across sixteen system configurations and seven buildings in five jurisdictions (Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the UK) plus a generic reference case. Global SHAP analysis attributes 89.8% of total HOE attribution to maintenance-related factors (H7, insufficient technical handover; H8, insufficient safety check; H9, inadequate periodic inspection), reframing the primary intervention from behavioural to structural. The reconstruction reproduces 112 published ERL values with a mean absolute percentage error of 1.8% on total ERL (13.7% on the HOE increment, the layer carrying the paper’s claims) and 96% interval coverage. Attribution outputs are translated into graded, risk-informed maintenance conditions for SCDF waiver assessment. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first Shapley values attribution of HOE factors in a building system-level Bayesian network fire risk model. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Fire Resilience and Safety Innovations in Buildings)
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25 pages, 1295 KB  
Article
Analysis of Fire Risks in Historical Hans and Development of Risk-Reduction Measures: A Case Study of the Bursa Han District Listed on the UNESCO World Heritage List
by Zuhal Şimşek
Buildings 2026, 16(11), 2240; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings16112240 - 2 Jun 2026
Viewed by 402
Abstract
(1) Background: The aim of this study is to identify fire risks in historical settlements, develop a method for assessing fire risks in buildings within conservation areas, and formulate risk-reducing measures. In this study, the fire risks of 11 historical hans located in [...] Read more.
(1) Background: The aim of this study is to identify fire risks in historical settlements, develop a method for assessing fire risks in buildings within conservation areas, and formulate risk-reducing measures. In this study, the fire risks of 11 historical hans located in the Hanlar district, which is listed o the UNESCO World Heritage List in Bursa, were tested using an eight-stage method. (2) Methods: The methodology of the study was developed in eight stages, including the analysis of historical fires in the Hanlar district of Bursa, the classification of potential fire risks in hans, examination of hans with regulations, identification and documentation of risks, determination of probability and severity values to calculate risk scores, identification of factors with high risk and implementation of risk-reducing measures, and reduction in the danger group by recalculating the risk score according to the new regulations. (3) Results: The fire risks of hans were evaluated in four main groups and 28 subgroups, including ignition, fire spread, evacuation, and fire intervention stages. (4) Conclusions: The protection of the buildings listed in the World Cultural Heritage List against disasters such as fires and earthquakes is important in terms of transferring historical identity and social and cultural values to future generations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Fire Resilience and Safety Innovations in Buildings)
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