The investigation of fire hazards in buildings using stochastic modelling

This research investigates the spread of fire and smoke in buildings as well as occupant egress. There are existing deterministic models for these. While deterministic models\ud provide averages of a process, stochastic models give the broad spectrum of all possible scenarios of the process giving the distribution function. The spread of smoke was first modelled by adding a noise component to the equation of an existing deterministic model. Later a deterministic model was developed and stochastic expressions derived using the Markov chain methodology. Though the Markov\ud chain is a discrete process, it was used in approximating smoke spread which is a continuous process. The spread of fire was investigated using network analysis. Various methods of modelling the spread of a phenomenon in a network were compared