OpenFire was created from a simple observation.

Fire engineering possesses an extraordinary body of knowledge, developed over decades through research, testing, engineering practice, standards development, and lessons learned from real fires. This knowledge exists across guidance documents, codes of practice, academic papers, technical reports, engineering handbooks, and the experience of practitioners around the world.

Yet much of it remains difficult to access, difficult to compare, and difficult to apply consistently.

Engineers often spend significant amounts of time searching for information, locating methods, checking assumptions, understanding limitations, and translating guidance into practical engineering tools. While this process is a normal part of professional practice, it can make it difficult to fully leverage the wealth of knowledge available to the profession.

OpenFire was created to address this challenge.

What OpenFire is

At its core, OpenFire is an AI-enabled fire engineering environment designed to help competent engineers interact with fire engineering knowledge more effectively. It brings together methods, guidance, research, calculations, documentation, and engineering tools into a single ecosystem built around transparency and professional judgement.

The objective is not to replace the engineer.

The objective is to help engineers explore, understand, and apply knowledge more efficiently.

This includes everything from simple hand calculations to comparisons between international approaches, understanding the assumptions behind different methods, exploring the state of the art in fire safety research, and identifying appropriate tools to support a particular engineering problem.

Transparency and professional judgement

The platform is built around a simple philosophy: engineering decisions should remain transparent, traceable, and defensible.

Methods should not exist as isolated equations hidden inside spreadsheets. Assumptions should not disappear into software interfaces. Limitations should not be buried in documents that nobody reads.

Instead, engineers should be able to understand where methods come from, when they are applicable, how they relate to other approaches, and what their limitations are.

Where AI fits

Artificial intelligence plays an important role in this vision, not by replacing professional judgement, but by helping engineers navigate complexity. As the volume of available information continues to grow, AI provides a mechanism to connect guidance, methods, examples, research, and engineering workflows in ways that would previously have been impractical.

The result is an environment that supports learning, exploration, and technical delivery while keeping the competent professional firmly at the centre of the process.

More than a library of equations

OpenFire is therefore more than a library of equations and more than a software platform.

It is an attempt to create a shared, transparent, and evolving foundation for fire engineering knowledge.

A place where engineers can learn, explore ideas, challenge assumptions, compare approaches, and ultimately make better-informed decisions.

Because the future of fire engineering will not be built on better software alone.

It will be built on better access to knowledge, better understanding of performance, and better support for the competent professionals responsible for protecting people from fire.