Fire research supporting the fire safety engineering design of buildings

Fire is a subject of great complexity and continues to place life and property potentially at risk. Advances in our knowledge and understanding of fire processes and fire precautions, through research, now enables buildings and other constructions to be designed with greater confidence using fire safety engineering. The paper tracks the important events over recent decades which have prompted the research based solutions underpinning our current knowledge base, sets out the new 'vision' of fire safety engineering for the future and identifies the broad areas of research which will be needed to bring this vision robustly into fruition in the early years of the next millennium.