THE EFFECT OF FIRETRUCK RELOCATIONS ON THE PERFORMANCE OF FIREFIGHTER SERVICE PROVIDERS
In life-threatening situations where every second counts, the timely arrival of firefighter services at the emergency scene can make the difference between survival and death. The location of firetrucks has a huge impact on the response time to an emergency scene, i.e., the total time between an incoming emergency call and the moment that a firetruck arrives at the emergency scene. The potential for improving performance of firefighter services is directly related to reducing response time. To realize short response times, it is crucial to plan firefighter services efficiently. Motivated by this, an algorithm has been developed which leads to additional movements of firetrucks compared to the reactive paradigm, where firetrucks depart from the base station when an emergency is reported. We study the effect of the relocations on the response time performance. We formulate the relocations from one configuration to a target configuration by the Linear Bottleneck Assignment Problem, so as to provide the quickest way to transition to the target configuration. Moreover, the performance is measured by a general penalty function, assigning to each possible response time a certain penalty. The purpose of this project is to develop the model Dynamic Firefighter Management (DFM). The results consistently show that DFM mainly gives a large potential for areas in which the coverage is rather low. When relocating is permitted, the coverage increases with approximately 59.9% in a normal situation and with 91.0% in busy situations. This is important for the implementation of DFM in practice. This model should serve as a basis for further research of this topic.