Mathematicians have developed a model that
advises firefighter management how to optimise the response time by either shifting the vehicles around or by relocating their barracks.
‘Our results show an enormous potential for improving arrival time for firefighters worldwide,’ the authors write in their article in ERCIM News. The authors are Pieter van den Berg, (PhD candidate EEMCS), Professor Rob van der Mei (CWI, Amsterdam) and Guido Legemaate from the Amsterdam Fire Department.
Their study focusses on Amsterdam and its environment where 1.150 man and women spread over 19 fire stations are responsible for the safety of 1 million inhabitants covering 354 square kilometres. The question is how to optimise the distribution of various vehicles over the fire stations, and possible locations of fire stations, to minimise the (response) time between a call comes in, and the firefighters arrive at the location.
The fire department provided the travel times between calling points and fire stations. To refine the analysis, the authors distinguished four different vehicle types needed for various incidents.
The optimisation method the authors used is called ‘integer linear programming’ and it guarantees the optimal solution given certain restraints. The calculation time varies, depending on the degrees of freedom, between a few minutes to a couple of hours.
Van den Berg feels restrained in sharing the results since response time is a sensitive issue in firefighting management. The numbers he mentions are “purely meant as an example”.
Comments are closed.