Analysis of the NFPA Fire Safety Evaluation System for Business Occupancies

The NFPA Fire Safety Evaluation System (FSES) provides a multiattribute approach to evaluating fire safety performance. Published in NFPA 101A, which addresses business occupancy as one of the four types of building use, the FSES consists of a process whereby fire safety parameters are assigned values, and a resulting score is calculated. The analysis in this paper uses the parametric value spread to rank these fire safety parameters and assess the differences between criteria for new and existing buildings.