Book Description

The locations of fire stations are an extremely important decision for emergency service providers and public officials to make in order to efficiently and effectively carry out fire and EMS service coverage to a jurisdiction's population and property. The provision of these essential services is vital and their deployment should be strategically located to allow for faster response times traveled by emergency vehicles. This study examines the current location set of all fire stations that deploy fire protection and emergency medical services (EMS) services in Toledo, Ohio. The goals of this study are to improve the efficiency of coverage in terms of decreasing total travel times and employing an 8 minute travel time constraint due to National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA) standards, in order to increase overall protection and safety. This study employs the methodologies of the MINISUM location allocation strategy and will utilize a maximum distance constraint to exclude long and unacceptable response times, increase efficiency of emergency services, reduce response times, thus increasing overall effectiveness in service delivery. The location allocation study of Toledo fire stations will be implemented with a Geographic Information System (GIS) to allow for a systematic and thorough location analysis approach. By using a GIS, the information and data collected from the relocation analysis will show that a lower objective function (z) can be achieved by decreasing total weighted aggregate travel time by fire station vehicles from its respective fire station. After choosing which fire stations in the current location set should be relocated, the study will recommend where they should be built and a comparison will be conducted of analyzing the opportunity costs associated with moving fire stations and altering the service area territories from fire station relocation.