Operational planning of vehicles for rescue and relief operations considering the unavailability of the relocated vehicles

Rapid urbanization has led to increasing fire incidents and false alarms, increasing the response time of fire departments. When a call arrives, the current technology deploys and relocates the vehicles based on their immediate impact on the system's preparedness. However, the unavailability of the relocated vehicles is often ignored during the relocation, thus the system's preparedness is overestimated. This paper presents a novel mixed-integer programming (MIP) model developed for the relocation and deployment of emergency/fire vehicles. The proposed model incorporates the unavailability element, and estimates system preparedness for future incidents more accurately than current models. To confirm the efficiency of the proposed approach, the required simulations were conducted in Mashhad, Iran. The results demonstrated the ability of the proposed model to improve the performance of the fire department in several performance metrics. We also provide sensitivity analysis over the critical parameters to demonstrate the robustness of the model.