THE STORY OF "FRAME"

"FRAME" is developed from a method proposed by the Swiss engineer M. GRETENER in the early sixties, and from various other similar approaches such as: ERIC (Evaluation du Risque d’Incendie par le Calcul), a method developed in France by SARAT and CLUZEL; the German DIN 18230, the Austrian TRBV100, insurance rating systems, etc...

Working as a fire protection design engineer, I discovered the GRETENER method and started to use it for design purposes in 1975. It worked quite well, but it had some drawbacks, which could be improved.

The major handicap was the use of tables for the various parameters. At the beginning, I did not have the complete tables, and later on it became clear after some tests, that some tables were not enough "fine tuned" to be used as an engineering guideline. The steps were sometimes too large, giving different results from guesswork by different persons on the same job. However, the general balance of factors was good and fitted well with the professional expertise of many of my fellow fire protection engineers.

Therefore, I gradually developed a new method to suit my needs as fire protection designer. Most tables were replaced by formulas for which measurable or identifiable values are used. Some influence factors were rearranged; others were split up to allow a different or a finer approach. The use of formulas became a rather easy task with the help of a programmable calculator.

The GRETENER-method was originally made for the property fire risk. Some reports of fires with minor property damage but with fatalities indicated a need for a similar but distinct approach for human fire safety. Consequential loss or business interruption is a third aspect of fire risk that is considered in "FRAME", following the same reasoning as for the property and life safety.

In the late seventies, MM. SARAT and CLUZEL developed in France such a variant of the GRETENER-method, aimed at life safety. Their method was called E.R.I.C. ( Evaluation du Risque d'Incendie par le Calcul). Their work was of great help to develop the second part of the "FRAME" method

In 1980, a second version of the GRETENER-method was published by the Swiss organisation KF-SIA-BVD. It took into account the double fire risk profile (property and life) and added some refinements to reflect the last findings in the fire protection field. In my opinion, some shortcomings of the original method remained and some were even enhanced, but it contained some information, which allowed me to upgrade the method I was using.

When I switched in 1983 to the insurance industry , I realised that fire has another major impact, i.e. the consequential loss or business interruption. Therefore, I developed the third part of the method, following the same reasoning as for the property and life safety. This became the first version of "FRAME" , which has been in Dutch and French in TD73 of the NVBB-ANPI in October 1988. A that time, a BASIC program was developed to facilitate the application of the method.

After more than ten years of using the "FRAME" version 1, only a few changes were needed to upgrade it to “Year 2000” knowledge. During the last years, it appears that "FRAME" can be applied as a proving tool for “performance based” fire protection designs. Since the balance between the influence factors is a faithful reproduction of most code requirements and general engineering experience, the method can easily be used to compare the overall equilibrium of an engineered solution to a Code imposed protection level.

Only in the area of evacuation time requirements, there was a lack of compatibility with code requirements. FRAME version 1985 did not take into account the requirements for multiple egress capacity, and counted only indirectly with the time passed in staircases. The evacuation time was also underestimated for very congested areas, as the compression effect of a crowd was not properly evaluated. Moreover, in the last 10 years, code requirements for exit paths converge toward a 300 seconds maximum evacuation time to reach a safe area after the fortuitous discovery of a fire. Furthermore, its was recognised that if people were unaware of an incipient fire, they might evacuate too late for their safety. This problem could arise in homes for elderly, hotels and similar occupancies. All these remarks were used to build a new formula for factor t in the FRAME 2000 version.

For business interruption, it appeared that multiple production centres tend to disappear and the formula for the salvage factor was simplified accordingly. The value factor formula was slightly modified to fit the year 2000 monetary values.

In 2008, the FRAME software was replaced by an Excel executable spreadsheet, developed in collaboration with Vinçotte Belgium, The reference and information datasheets were updated and some extra features were included.