Open-source platform available to all at no cost
Students at Korea Fire Safety Meister High School have developed an AI service called FiSA (Fire Safety AI) that specializes exclusively in fire safety regulations, the Gangwon Province Office of Education announced Friday. The tool is available to the public free of charge.
FiSA searches the original text of fire safety laws to answer queries. When users enter a building's purpose, floor area and number of stories, it identifies the required fire suppression and safety equipment along with the relevant legal basis.
Rather than relying on commercial AI APIs, the students installed an open-source AI model — Qwen3 14B — on their school's own server, enabling a free service they say is more accurate than general-purpose AI tools.
The Gangwon Province Office of Education praised the team for handling everything themselves, from replacing server components to building a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for searching regulations, giving the students direct, hands-on experience with core AI service technology.
The four-member team, called L.I.F.E, visited a fire safety equipment company, Ankuk Engineering, and surveyed practitioners there. They found that answers from general-purpose AI tools were difficult to use directly in design and licensing work.
General-purpose AI tools sometimes cite secondary sources such as blogs and online forums, or get article numbers wrong — errors that can translate into design mistakes.
FiSA offers three functions: answering regulatory questions, determining which fire safety equipment is required, and calculating design values.
Every response includes the relevant article number, and when information is insufficient, the system asks a follow-up question rather than guessing.
The tool updates daily with revisions from the Ministry of Government Legislation and can also answer based on past standards applicable at the time of permitting or ground-breaking.
In a 12-question comparison the students conducted against Google's Gemini, Gemini missed emergency alarm equipment requirements for all four buildings tested, while FiSA correctly identified the installation requirements and cited the relevant articles for all four.
Yoon Jung-o, a fire protection engineer at Yujin C&E, said the most impressive aspect of FiSA is that every response displays the relevant article alongside the answer, allowing practitioners to check the original text immediately. "Above all, it is remarkable that high school students built this from the server up and released such a specialized AI tool for free," he said. "I expect it to dramatically cut the time needed for design review at fire safety sites."
abc@heraldcorp.com
