Digital Simulator for Allocating Firefighting Resources

Abstract

The problem of allocating firefighting resources is complicated by the existence of numerous criteria for measuring the adequacy of service and by differ ences in the equipment and capabilities of service units. Our simulator consists of one program that generates simulated events from historical data and a second program that processes the simulated data and produces statistics that describe the avail ability and utilization of firefighting resources. We are able to improve the accuracy with which the simulator reproduces historical data by:

(1) factoring data concerning the occurrence of fire incidents into daily, monthly, and hourly components, (2) dividing a generalized exponential distribution of fire incident duration into response and time- dependent components, and (3) characterizing driving- time distributions as geographically dependent gamma functions. The simulator uses historical data available from fire departments. Example applica tions include evaluating alternative approaches to improving fire service in a particular area, invest igating the possible impact of a series of arson fires, and planning for urban growth.