Italian hybrid fire prevention code

Abstract

Fire safety of residential buildings and activities subjected to fire inspection are difficult tasks, especially when the safety targets have to be adopted in pre-existing buildings or in activities that are going to be modified into more complex ones. Generally, these circumstances show more constraints and it can be difficult to achieve an acceptable level of fire residual risk by prescriptive based fire regulations. Therefore, the Italian National Fire Rescue and Service in charge of fire safety, in August 2015, issued a new Fire Prevention Code whose design methodology is more oriented to fire performance based design rather than prescriptive fire codes. The flexibility of this new fire design methodology offers a very complex tool for experts in order to design fire safety measures and strategies for buildings and activities subjected to fire inspection. The present paper aims to highlight the contents and the fire safety strategy design methodology of the new Italian Fire Prevention Code.