What is OpenFire?

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.

From the calculation to the people who deliver it

Understanding a fire safety problem is only part of the work. Sooner or later someone has to design the solution, specify it, install it, test it or give evidence about it, and fire safety is delivered by a long supply chain of specialist companies rather than by any one practice.

That is why OpenFire includes a public directory of fire safety companies. It covers fire engineering alongside the trades and services that sit around it, such as fire doors, suppression, smoke management, passive fire protection, alarm and detection, testing laboratories and expert witnesses. Anyone can search it by category, specialism, country, region, city or company name, read reviews, and find companies their own network would never surface. Each month the most viewed companies are recognised in rankings by country and category.

Listings are factual records: registered company number, years in practice, offices and stated scope. They are not endorsements. OpenFire does not select, certify or recommend companies, and choosing who to appoint remains a matter of professional judgement.

Listing a company costs nothing. Many are already listed from public registers, so the usual first step is to find your company and claim it, then keep its details, offices and scope current. If it is not there yet, you can add it from your settings and publish it whenever you are ready.

Tenders that fit your work

Public sector fire safety work is advertised across many procurement portals, and finding the notices that matter usually means checking site after site. OpenFire gathers fire safety tenders from across the web, sorts each one by the fire safety work it involves and where it is, and matches it to the specialisms and locations of the companies in the directory.

Subscribers receive a weekly email of new matches, and a feed where they can save tenders and track what they bid for, won and lost. The aim is simple: time goes on the bids rather than the search. Tenders cover the UK today, with other countries coming soon. You can read more on the tenders page.

Tender matching is part of Directory Premium, an optional plan billed to the company rather than to an individual. It also gives a listing a labelled Sponsored spot on the directory pages that match it, project photos, and anonymised insight into how the company’s profile is performing against the typical company in its market.

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.