Optimising the spatial location of urban fire stations

One of the most essential public services in urban areas is fire protection and response. It also happens to be one of the most costly. As urban areas grow, develop and change, it is important to plan services accordingly, both in terms of safety as well as being fiscally responsible. This paper discusses strategic planning goals and objectives in fire protection and response, and details modeling approaches to support fire station siting. A case study examining a fire service system for a city in California is used to illustrate the importance of strategic planning and system re-evaluation when expanding services.

[1]  Jane M. Hogg,et al.  The Siting of Fire Stations , 1968 .

[2]  Charles S. ReVelle,et al.  The Location of Emergency Service Facilities , 1971, Oper. Res..

[3]  Ioannis Giannikos,et al.  A new model for maximal coverage exploiting GIS capabilities , 2010, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[4]  Charles S. ReVelle,et al.  The Maximum Availability Location Problem , 1989, Transp. Sci..

[5]  Habib Chabchoub,et al.  Goal Programming Model for Fire and Emergency Service Facilities Site Selection , 2010, INFOR Inf. Syst. Oper. Res..

[6]  Dominique Peeters,et al.  Locating fire stations: An integrated approach for Belgium , 2012 .

[7]  Jared L. Cohon,et al.  Some models for fire protection locational decisions , 1980 .

[8]  Daoqin Tong,et al.  Maximising coverage of spatial demand for service , 2009 .

[9]  Alan T. Murray,et al.  GIS and spatial analysis in the media , 2009 .

[10]  Charles ReVelle,et al.  Central Facilities Location , 2010 .

[11]  Daoqin Tong,et al.  Spatial optimization: expanding emergency services to address regional growth and development , 2012 .

[12]  D. Tong.  Regional Coverage Maximization: A New Model to Account Implicitly for Complementary Coverage , 2012 .

[13]  Bülent Çatay.  Siting new fire stations in Istanbul: A risk-based optimization approach , 2011, OR Insight.

[14]  Reinaldo Morabito,et al.  Emergency service systems: The use of the hypercube queueing model in the solution of probabilistic location problems , 2008, Int. Trans. Oper. Res..

[15]  Charles ReVelle,et al.  Siting Ambulances and Fire Companies: New Tools for Planners , 1991 .

[16]  Lili Yang,et al.  A fuzzy multi-objective programming for optimization of fire station locations through genetic algorithms , 2007, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[17]  Pitu B. Mirchandani,et al.  Development and application of a fire station placement model , 1985 .

[18]  Richard L. Church,et al.  The maximal covering location problem , 1974 .

[19]  J. Schreuder.  Application of a location model to fire stations in Rotterdam , 1981 .

[20]  Bo Huang,et al.  Optimal Siting of Fire Stations using GIS and ANT Algorithm , 2006 .

[21]  Jie Lin,et al.  Evaluating representation and scale error in the maximal covering location problem using GIS and intelligent areal interpolation , 2012, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[22]  Vladimir Marianov,et al.  Siting Emergency Services , 1995 .

[23]  Mark S. Daskin,et al.  A Maximum Expected Covering Location Model: Formulation, Properties and Heuristic Solution , 1983 .

[24]  Richard L. Church,et al.  Integrating expected coverage and local reliability for emergency medical services location problems , 2010 .

[25]  Amr K. Mortagy,et al.  A multi-objective model for locating fire stations , 1998, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[26]  Vladimir Marianov,et al.  The Queueing Maximal availability location problem: A model for the siting of emergency vehicles , 1996 .

[27]  Richard L. Church,et al.  Manpower Deployment in Emergency Services , 2001 .

[28]  Donald R. Plane,et al.  Mathematical Programming and the Location of Fire Companies for the Denver Fire Department , 1977, Oper. Res..

[29]  Daoqin Tong,et al.  Enhancing Classic Coverage Location Models , 2010 .