Knowledge / Workflows
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.
A fire strategy is only as good as the drawings that carry it out. The fire engineer writes the report, the architect draws the walls and doors, the schedules give them ratings, and the specifications describe what passes through the compartment lines, each revised separately. The fire strategy consistency check compares the report against all of them. Today it is done by eye, by the fire engineer at each stage and the design manager before a submission. It is partial, hurried and repeated after every re-issue, and what it misses surfaces as a building control query or a wrong door on site. Structured knowledge lets the team run the check across the whole set each time something changes, and keeps the fire engineer and design manager on the decisions.
What the workflow involves today
Pull the current fire strategy report and its marked-up plans, and confirm which revision the design team is working to.
Overlay the strategy plans on the general arrangement drawings and walk each compartment line and protected route.
Read the wall type schedule for each wall the line passes through and note the fire resistance given.
Read the door schedule for every door on the line and on the escape routes, and compare the ratings.
Check the fire stopping, cavity barrier and services specifications against what the strategy asks for at penetrations and voids.
Record each contradiction, raise a TQ or a drawing comment, and chase the re-issue.
Repeat when the strategy, the drawings or the schedules are revised, usually only for the level that changed.
Where generic AI tools fail
A general-purpose tool can summarise a fire strategy report and it can, after a fashion, read a door schedule. It cannot read the strategy plan against the general arrangement, because a line drawn on one plan and a wall drawn on another are not connected in anything it can see, and it cannot follow a wall on the plan to the row in the wall type schedule that gives its rating. Ask it whether the drawings agree with the strategy and it returns a summary of the strategy with a sentence saying the drawings appear consistent, which is not a check, and no fire engineer would sign it.
The tool also has no idea which revision is current. The strategy has been through several revisions with the same file name, the door schedule was re-issued last week, and the level plans move on their own cycle. Whatever it reads, it reads as the present state. The result is a confident statement about compartmentation that may describe a design three issues old, and the design manager has to reopen every drawing to find out, which is the check they were trying to avoid. Confidence without a revision reference is the most expensive kind on a higher-risk building.
What changes with structured knowledge
When the project record is structured knowledge rather than a folder of files, the compartment line in the strategy, the wall it runs through, the doors along it and the specification clauses for what passes through it are already connected, so the comparison runs across every level and every revision, rather than the one level someone had time to overlay.
What the fire engineer and design manager receive is a list of contradictions. Each one names the strategy paragraph and plan, the drawing and the schedule row that disagree with it, the values in question, and the revision that introduced the difference, so the team can see whether the strategy moved or the drawings did. Items already resolved by a re-issue or a TQ response are marked as such, with the document that closed them.
The fire engineer decides what is a design change and what is a drafting error, the design manager issues the instructions, and time goes on those decisions rather than on the overlay. The check supports the professionals' judgement; it does not certify the design. When building control or the regulator asks what was checked, the record shows which documents, at which revisions, and what was found.
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.
Related to
The check reads the fire strategy documents against the construction drawings, the drawing schedules for doors and walls, and the construction specifications for fire stopping, cavity barriers and building services. It is one input to the Gateway 2 readiness review on a higher-risk building, and it uses the same clause-to-drawing relationships as the specification to drawing consistency check.
Does it check the specifications as well as the drawings?
Does it tell us whether the strategy complies with the regulations?
How do we see it on our own fire strategy?