Abstract In South Africa alone, there are more than 5000 informal settlement fires a year, where a single incident can leave up to 10000 people homeless. The government and local authorities of countries with informal settlements, that extend over large areas, have no tools to simulate fires to identify high risk areas, or to quantify the magnitude of an incident to which they may need to respond. It is with this backdrop that the paper seeks to develop a semi-probabilistic method to determine fire spread rates in informal settlements. Data from a full-scale fire experiment is used to validate the fire spread rates predicted by B-RISK from which a simplified semi-probabilistic analysis method is developed that can estimate fire spread rates in informal settlements. B-RISK simulations are then compared to an actual informal settlement fire incident to assess its predictive capabilities. The paper also discusses how the effect of wind has been included and what additional features could be incorporated to obtain more realistic informal settlement fire spread predictions. This work provides the first step in a complex problem where it is difficult to accurately define input parameters.

中文翻译：

---

使用 B-RISK 开发非正规住区火灾蔓延的半概率模型的初步调查

摘要 仅在南非，每年就有 5000 多起非正规住区火灾，一次事故可能导致多达 10000 人无家可归。拥有非正规住区的国家的政府和地方当局覆盖大片区域，没有工具来模拟火灾以识别高风险区域，或量化他们可能需要响应的事件的严重程度。正是在这种背景下，本文试图开发一种半概率方法来确定非正规住区的火势蔓延率。来自全面火灾实验的数据用于验证 B-RISK 预测的火灾蔓延率，从中开发了一种简化的半概率分析方法，可以估计非正规住区的火灾蔓延率。然后将 B-RISK 模拟与实际的非正式住区火灾事件进行比较，以评估其预测能力。该论文还讨论了如何包括风的影响以及可以结合哪些附加特征来获得更现实的非正式住区火灾蔓延预测。这项工作为解决难以准确定义输入参数的复杂问题迈出了第一步。