The Siting of Fire Stations

Abstract

Perhaps the most important decision facing any Chief Fire Officer is how many fire stations to have and on which sites to build them. It is appreciated that the optimum solution is that which minimizes the sum of the financial loss from fire and the cost of providing the fire brigade. Financial loss data are not as yet available so the criteria for optimization have had to be altered.A technique has been evolved which minimizes the total number of fire appliance journey times to fires for any given number of fire stations. A set of solutions is obtained giving the best combination of r station sites from a set of n alternative sites, where r varies from n-1 to 1. This technique has been applied to the area covered by Bristol Fire Brigade and the results are discussed.Although the criterion adopted for optimization was necessarily unsatisfactory a near valid set of answers appears to have been obtained. Suggestions for future work are also made.

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