Abstract
In the present paper an attempt is made to accurately understand the spread and progress of fire by dividing the spread of a fire within a single building into several phases and by relating them to one another from the point of view of theory of probability.
At first, a more adequate form of fire spread model for application by collecting and classifying data of actual housing fires is composed as a stochastic state-transition system. The system of differential equations which describes the behaviour of this stochastic state-transition corresponding fire spread is derived and its solution is obtained. Similarly the equation of survival probability for each phase at each time is solved.
Secondly, as a simplified measure of the above stochastic fire spread system, the average arrival time and the average extinguishment time for each phase are obtained from the above solution.
Finally, the unknown parameters in our model are estimated with data consisted of a total of 335 fire-cases randomly sampled from actual fires. And the behaviour of the value of survival probability for each phase is obtained.
