A Message from the Editor

All,

Welcome to this year’s third issue. I hope that you have enjoyed the summer and its holidays, now it’s time to enjoy the autumn season and its special features. Our editorial panel is now working full time searching for interesting articles, something that they really accomplished for this issue.

In this issue you will find six interesting articles. As always, a widespread of themes but still very relevant to any practitioner in the fire safety community. All of the articles are certainly worth reading but I would like to dive in a bit deeper into one of them; Algorithms and the Black Box Problem. It touches upon some very relevant issues that we “suffer” in the Industry. The article is focused on safety critical systems, but my mind almost directly goes to fire engineering modeling in all its facets, sometimes it is really hard to actually determine with certainty how the input data was transformed to output data. Sorry to say many of us, engineers in general, tend to have a very high trust in any program producing results of any type as long as they are useful to us. The verification and validation part tend to be forgotten, we simply assume that the program produces reliable results. There are some ways to get around this and the article suggests some good initiatives.

Finally, I would like to encourage our readers to consider contributing with articles, if you feel that you have an important subject that you would like to tell the industry about do not hesitate to contact us so that we can make this happen. We would really like to receive more articles from readers of the magazine, now the percentage of articles that are being sent to us it very low compared to the number of articles identified by our editorial board.

As always, a great thanks to the people who have put in a lot of time and effort to make this issue a reality.

I sincerely hope that all of you will enjoy your summer vacations, and hopefully you will be looking forward to the next issue of the magazine that will come in December.  

Yours sincerely, 

 Jimmy Jönsson, Managing Editor