WOBO appreciates the guide towards consistency and Fire Safety.
The Australian Fire Engineering Guide (AFEG) has been developed by a team of specialist fire engineers (FE). The AFEG is part of the National Construction Code (NCC) support documents, and provides a guideline that meets the modern needs of the Australian fire engineering community. AFEG supersedes the International Fire
Engineering Guidelines (IFEG).
AFEG Part 1 provides an insight to the issues that go beyond actual engineering, and a perspective on the role of engineering within the regulatory and non-regulatory systems. This portion of the AFEG is intended to link engineering practice with the state- and territory-based legal and regulatory system of choice.
The AFEG has been developed for use in the fire safety design of buildings. It will also be of use for appropriate authorities in carrying out their role of approving building designs. The AFEG is intended for use by competent and experienced FEs, as discussed in Section 1.1.2.
This document was made possible by the generous contributions of the team of specialist FEs involved in its development. Thanks to Dr Jonathan Barnett, Sarnia Rusbridge, Tobias Salomonsson and Kjetil Pedersen for donating your time and expertise. The expert team would like to acknowledge helpful feedback from members of the Engineers Australia Society of Fire Safety.
The AFEG development team is also grateful to Dr Brian Ashe for his guidance and comments.
The Australian Fire Engineering Guide (AFEG) supersedes the International Fire Engineering Guidelines (IFEG).
The objectives of the AFEG are to:
provide a link between the regulatory system and fire engineering (Part 1)
provide guidance about the process of fire engineering (Part 2)
provide guidance on available methodologies (Part 3)
describe the AFEG’s philosophy of use (Part 4).
The AFEG is a process document. Its purpose as a National Construction Code (NCC) support document is to provide guidance. The use of a mandatory format was discussed before the development of both the first and second editions of IFEG, and
again for the AFEG. It was concluded that fire engineering lacks the necessary array of validated tools and data to produce a mandatory document.
Fire engineering designs are complex and generally require extensive use of engineering judgement. So, in order to approve a fire engineering design, appropriate authorities need an understanding of the fire engineering process and what
constitutes an acceptable fire engineering design. Therefore, guidance is required to improve both the standard of fire engineering applied by practitioners, and the ability of the appropriate authority to carry out their function of safeguarding the community.