Knowledge / AEC-native Data
Fire strategy documents
The fire strategy report and its supporting drawings and specifications, setting out compartmentation, escape, structural fire protection and systems.
On its own, a fire strategy report is a narrative; read against the drawings, it is the design. The report states where the compartment lines run, how far anyone travels to escape, which routes are protected, and what fire resistance the structure holds. A fire strategy document AI has to hold that report and the documents that carry it out in view together: the architect's plans, the door schedule, the fire stopping and services specifications, each on its own revision cycle and each obliged to agree with it. On a higher-risk building it is central to Gateway 2 and the golden thread. Structured knowledge makes it something the fire engineer, design manager and principal designer can question, each answer traceable to a paragraph, a drawing and a revision.
What Teams Ask of the Data
Which compartment lines does the strategy rely on, and does every one of them appear on the general arrangements and the wall type schedule?
Do the door schedule ratings match the walls the doors sit in and the escape routes the strategy protects?
Which revision of the strategy is current, what changed from the previous one, and which drawings were re-issued in response?
Which management, occupancy or evacuation assumptions does the strategy depend on, and who has agreed them?
Where does the fire stopping specification or the services specification fall short of what the strategy asks for?
Which parts of the strategy rely on a departure from guidance, and where is the justification recorded?
Which items are still marked to be confirmed or subject to the fire engineer's review?
What Generic AI Misses
The fire strategy is a narrative about lines on drawings. "Compartmentation is provided between the flats and the common corridor at 60 minutes" is a sentence; what it means is a set of walls on a plan, a set of doors in a schedule and a set of penetrations in a specification. A text reader takes the sentence at its word. It cannot see that the 60-minute line on the strategy plan for level 4 runs through a wall the wall type schedule gives 30, or that the doors along it are scheduled below what the strategy requires. Its references to Approved Document B or a British Standard get paraphrased loosely, because the model has read about the guidance rather than the clause the engineer cited, and a loose paraphrase of fire guidance is a liability.
Then there is the question of which strategy. A strategy goes through several revisions with the same title, and the drawings it references move on their own cycle. A tool describes the approach in the file it was handed, with the right vocabulary and section numbers, with no way of knowing that the current revision moved a compartment line, or that the door schedule was re-issued after the strategy was last updated. The answer is plausible because it sounds like a fire engineer. On a higher-risk building, that is the answer that shapes what gets submitted.
What Structured Knowledge Answers
QUESTION
Which fire doors on the level 4 escape route are scheduled below the rating the fire strategy requires for the protected corridor, and which document is current?
ANSWER
Fire strategy revision P04, the current issue, requires the walls between the flats and the level 4 corridor to be 60-minute compartment walls with FD30S flat entrance doors, and FD60S doors where the corridor meets the stair lobby and the risers. The door schedule at rev C05 gives the lobby doors D-4-001 and D-4-002 and the riser door D-4-031 as FD30S. Rev C04 of the schedule had all three at FD60S. The change at C05 is noted as "ratings aligned to fire strategy", but it aligned them to revision P03, which treated the lobby as part of the corridor. P04, issued three weeks later, separated the lobby and raised the rating. The general arrangement drawing 2104 rev C06 tags the lobby walls as W4, which the wall type schedule gives 60 minutes, so the walls agree with P04 and the doors do not.
SOURCES
fire strategy report rev P03 and rev P04, section 6.2 and plan FS-104; door schedule, drawing 6004 rev C04 and C05; level 4 general arrangement, drawing 2104 rev C06; wall type schedule, drawing 9001 rev C02.
Illustrative. The project, documents and references are invented to show what an answer looks like; nothing in it is advice.
We onboard a focused slice of your project data, configure the ingestion paths, extract a structured context graph, and build a workflow against the resulting structured knowledge layer.
The Data in Context
The strategy depends on the construction drawings that show its lines, the drawing schedules that give doors and walls their ratings, and the construction specifications that define fire stopping, cavity barriers and the services that pass through compartment walls. The fire strategy consistency check reads all of those against the report, and the Gateway 2 readiness review places the strategy within the wider application set for a higher-risk building.
Related Knowledge
Construction drawings
The 2D graphical record of design intent: plans, sections, elevations, details, schedules and title blocks, issued as sheets with revisions.
Construction specifications
The written performance and prescriptive requirements for materials, workmanship and systems, organised by work section (NBS, CSI MasterFormat, Uniclass).
Drawing schedules (doors, windows, finishes, equipment)
Tabular schedules on drawings or in the model listing elements, their references, properties and locations, and the links between them and the plans.
Fire strategy consistency check
Checking the fire strategy report against the drawings, specifications and schedules it depends on, and surfacing contradictions before they reach the regulator or site.
Gateway 2 readiness review
Checking a higher-risk building application for contradictions and gaps across the fire strategy, structural and design information before submission to the regulator.
Which fire strategy formats and supporting documents does it read?
Does it check the strategy against the regulations?
How do we see it on one of our own fire strategies?