A Geospatial Study on Emergency Response Management System to Combat Fire Accidents—A Case Study of Chennai, Tamil Nadu

Abstract

Urban fire is one of the most disturbing problems for many cities around the world. Fire risks in urban areas have increased over the years especially in metropolitan cities which are characterized by dense population, frequent traffic jams, congested roads and presence of slums. The effect of major fire breakout is disastrous and the consequent damage will run into heavy loss of lives and property. The objective of this paper is therefore to establish a GIS (Geographic Information System) [1] based emergency response management system where fire services can identify the optimal route from its station to any fire incident. Since access to a fire incident and timely intervention play a crucial role in managing urban fire, the optimal route was modeled based on the distance of travel, time of travel, and the delays in travel times. Besides using this analysis to timely respond to urban fire emergency services, analysis also performed on the spatial distribution of fire accidents to understand the scenario of previously occurred fire accidents.