Location Optimization of Urban Fire Stations Considering the Backup Coverage

Urban fires threaten the economic stability and safety of urban residents. Therefore, the limited number of fire stations should cover as many places as possible. Moreover, places with high fire risk should be covered by more fire stations. To optimize the location of urban fire stations, we construct a multi-objective optimization model for fire station planning based on the backup coverage model. The improved value of environment and ecosystem (SAVEE) model is introduced to quantify the spatial heterogeneity of urban fires. The main city zone of Wuhan is used as the study area to validate the proposed method. The results show that, considering the existing fire stations (85 facilities), the proposed model achieves a significant 38.56% in high-risk areas that can be covered by more than one fire station. If the existing fire stations are not considered when building 95 fire stations, the proposed model can achieve coverage of 50.07% in high-risk areas by utilizing more than one fire station. As a result, the proposed backup coverage model would perform better if the protection of high-risk areas is improved with as few fire stations as possible to guarantee more places covered.

Automated summary

Urban fires pose threats to the economy and safety of urban residents. An optimized placement of fire stations is necessary to cover as many areas as possible and focus on high-risk areas. This study proposes a multi-objective optimization model for fire station planning based on the backup coverage model, using the SAVEE model to quantify the spatial heterogeneity of urban fires. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in covering high-risk areas with as few fire stations as possible.