Evaluation of FISPAT Fire Spread Analysis Tool

In 2002 an amendment was added to the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS)[1] which opened up for shipbuilders to replace steel with lightweight materials in the superstructures. However, SOLAS requires equal fire safety capability compared to ships with steel superstructures. LASS-c is a cross-organizational project with the aim to find a method to build cruise ships with part of the superstructure made in lightweight materials. The purpose of this LASS-c sub-project has been to develop a software tool in Java (FISPAT) that helps identifying fire sensitive areas in cruise vessels structures. In FISPAT the user can make a model of the vessel structure containing rooms, networks and devices. FISPAT then performs exhaustive simulation of fire spread and fault injections in the model and presents it to the user. The user then analyzes the results to find fire and fault sensitive parts. By introducing additional networks and devices or altering the ones already existing, iterative simulations lead to a better cruise vessel design. FISPAT could be extended in different ways. Providing use of existing CAD models would speed up the analyses of different cruise vessels. As of now, the user need to manually translate the drawings into FISPAT format which takes time. Other extensions could be to allow for more complex room structures than cuboids. With a few tweaks FISPAT could be used for analyses in other related areas such as buildings but also in analyses of other types of harm than fire, e.g. virus spread in computer networks. The same simulation engine could be used for these types while some extensions could be needed for e.g. graphical representation.