The Construction and Application of a Qualitative Evaluation Index System for the Adaptability of Gas Fire Extinguishing Systems in Typical Complex Protected Objects

To address the compatibility challenges in selecting gas fire suppression systems for three typical complex protected environments—data centers, museum artifact storage rooms, and aircraft cargo holds—this paper establishes a multi-level evaluation framework comprising 25 third-tier indicators across five dimensions: protected object characteristics, fire suppression effectiveness, safety performance, environmental impact, and economic cost. Instead of computing weighted scores and producing a numerical ranking, this study determines indicator importance through a rule-based qualitative procedure, classifying each indicator into four importance grades—critically important, important, generally important, and not important—according to standards, safety consequences, and engineering applicability. The importance of each indicator is differentially classified across the three scenarios, and the performance differences among four mainstream gas fire suppression systems (perfluoroketone-based, HFC-227ea, IG541, and CO2) are systematically analyzed under these criteria. The results reveal three typical patterns of indicator importance differentiation: scenario-specific dominance, high cross-scenario consensus, and gradient differentiation. The sets of critically important indicators vary significantly among scenarios: data centers prioritize equipment safety, artifact storage rooms emphasize both personnel and cultural heritage safety, and aircraft cargo holds focus primarily on structural safety. This “qualitative” indicator system provides a structured evaluation framework for the differentiated selection of gas fire suppression systems across diverse application scenarios, rather than yielding a composite score or a quantitative ranking of candidate systems.