NFPA Journal - Summer 2021 - 28

Dispatches

RESEARCH

A NEW APPROACH
TO ITM
AS A PROJECT TO STANDARDIZE INSPECTION, TESTING,
AND MAINTENANCE DATA NEARS COMPLETION,
EXPERTS LOOK TO A FUTURE OF MORE EFFECTIVE,
DATA-DRIVEN CODES AND STANDARDS
By Angelo Verzoni

made even more effective with the addition of data-driven
approaches to ITM.
" There's a huge need for this data, " Hutchison said. " We
see this initiative not only as an opportunity to enable
facility managers to make data-informed decisions on ITM
activities for their own facilities, but also as an opportunity
for stakeholders to provide a standardized set of data to do
further research on. This research could help us do things
like predict when a fire pump is going to fail. "

Standardizing the data
ITM data has always been collected by various entities, including contractors, inspectors, facility owners, insurers, and
manufacturers, but rarely in a consistent way. It's an issue the
foundation has run into many times during past projects.
" We've tried to collect ITM data to analyze the performance and reliability of fire protection systems, " Hutchison
said. " But one of the biggest challenges has always been that
everyone you get data from has it in a different format, and
the terminology is different. It's an extremely manual and
laborious process to consolidate all of it into a single format
that can be analyzed. "
The new project, officially named the ITM Data Exchange
project, was launched to address the problem, and after
more than a year of research, the foundation has come up

GETT Y IMAGES

new, scalable approach to standardizing
and consolidating inspection, testing, and
maintenance (ITM) data may soon bring better-informed ITM frequency requirements to
a range of NFPA documents-requirements
based on data-driven, risk- and performance-based criteria
rather than anecdotal evidence.
That's the aim of the Fire Protection Research Foundation (FPRF), which is nearing completion of a project that
could enable large-scale ITM data collection, standardization of ITM requirements in codes and standards, and ease
of sharing ITM data among industry stakeholders.
Nearly 70 NFPA codes and standards require some form
of ITM for fire protection systems, and an important aspect
of those requirements is knowing when to perform these
activities. Even so, the ITM frequencies required by standards such as NFPA 25, Standard for the Inspection, Testing,
and Maintenance of Water-Based Fire Protection Systems,
aren't based on empirical data.
" There isn't a lot of substantiation to those requirements, " said
Victoria Hutchison, a research project manager with the FPRF.
" They're based on engineering judgment and guidance from
technical committee members and their experiences in the field. "
While there's a great deal of proven value in that fieldbased experience, experts say the requirements could be

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NFPA Journal - Summer 2021

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