Mr Craig Wegener

Honours thesis

Optimal locations of fire stations across the MFS/CFS boundary in Adelaide, South Australia

This pro ject is concerned with the optimal locations of emergency ?re service stations, given that each station may provide different services and levels of service to its neighbouring community. Initially, a simpli?ed version of the problem of placement of stations is con- sidered, consisting of a rectangular region divided into two equal sized sub- regions and a uniform response time (though unique for each) for Metropoli- tan Fire Service (MFS) and Country Fire Service (CFS) regions, to gain insight into the number of stations one can expect to require for the more detailed problem. The Greater Adelaide area is then considered (from the coast in the West to the foothills in the East, and Dalkeith in the North to Onkaparinga Valley in the South). A set covering approach is used to locate the stations such that each client is serviced by at least one station within the required maximum response time for that region. Due to current com- puter capabilities, a coarse grid is required to obtain a set covering solution for the region size considered. The technique of Simulated Annealing is then applied to a ?ner grid of the region, slightly shifting the station locations and determining whether the solution can be improved further. Once the minimum number of stations required is obtained, the number is used to consider four new ob jective functions: maximising overlap of cover- age of stations; maximising bene?t based on minimising response distance to clients; maximising coverage of risk due to structure ?re and maximising coverage of risk due to road crash. Hence, the intention is to maximise each ob jective function while maintaining complete coverage of the entire feasible region with fewest stations. Com- parisons of results between these ob jectives are made.