Service area delimitation of fire stations with fire risk analysis: Implementation and case study

Abstract

Under the rapid development of urbanization, fire service becomes one of the biggest contributive factors to personal health and property safety. A reasonable plan of fire services should first address the issue of service area delimitation for fire emergency facilities. Specifically, there are two key factors for fire services including rescue efficiency and load balancing, which are usually handled by the space partitioning methods (e.g., Voronoi diagram). The traditional methods tend to model the space in a homogeneous plane with Euclidean distance, while in reality, the movement of rescuing is constrained by the street network. In addition, the built environment is complex by its variation of fire risk across places. Therefore, we propose a novel constrained Voronoi diagram for fire service area delimitation by adding the datasets of street network and historical fire incidents. Considering the prior knowledge that a fire engine is expected to reach the location of incident within five minutes, which is also called Golden 5 min, we propose a network partitioning algorithm which is able to increase the five-minute coverage of fire stations. Through a case study in Nanjing, China, we demonstrate the practicability of the proposed method in delimitating service areas of fire stations across time.