Title: The fire station location problem: a literature survey

Authors: Esra Aleisa

Addresses: College of Engineering and Petroleum, Industrial and Management Systems Engineering Department, Kuwait University, Khaldia Bldg. 8KH, 3rd Floor, P.O. Box 5969, Safat 13060, Kuwait

Abstract: Urban fire causes significant threat to the loss of lives and property. The location of a fire station is critical to reduce response time to incident place and eventually increase possibility of beating life-threatening dangerous flashovers. Fuzzy international standards, population density, traffic conditions and distance to other existing fire stations, fire resources and hazardous are some of the criteria considered in the fire station location problem. In this paper, we conduct a thorough literature survey of well-founded research that bring forth methodologies for better fire stations locations. It compares methodologies that adopt fuzzy multi-objective optimisation, maximal coverage, geographic information system (GIS), genetic algorithm (GA), ant algorithm, Tabu search (TS) and simulated annealing (SA) to solve the complex problem with higher efficiency and in due course of increasing possibility of rescue and survival.

Keywords: fire stations; location; response time; mathematical modelling; operations research; optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEM.2018.094239

International Journal of Emergency Management, 2018 Vol.14 No.3, pp.291 - 302

Received: 19 Dec 2016
Accepted: 11 May 2017
Published online: 23 Aug 2018 *

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