The fire station location problem: a literature survey

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.