Optimizing fire station locations for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality

摘要

The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) serves 790 mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive sub districts in Istanbul and aims to respond to each fire incident within five minutes. The research work has tried to present a subset of locations to place facilities to minimize the cost of serving clients as well as the cost of a facility location to obtain a specified coverage level. Besides, the work is also of importance because Istanbul city is located on a seismic belt and is also in the UNESCO world heritage list. The paper presents the implementation of set-covering and maximal-covering models for solving IMM's fire station location problem. The variants of the model (ten scenarios) considers what-if scenarios, such as unlimited budget, building all fire stations from scratch, or placing additional weight on covering cultural and historical treasures. Using a GIS, the network distances between candidate locations and sub districts, coverage percentages, and various model solutions have been analyzed. Further, using a logistic function, the forecast of fire incidents into 2015 and the robustness of the proposed optimal locations have been discussed. (47 refs.)