Optimal Siting of Fire Stations Using GIS and ANT Algorithm

Safety and emergency response are being given greater importance while planning infrastructure and transportation projects. This is particularly so, when transporting hazardous materials HAZMAT within a heavily urbanized area such as Singapore. The number and location of fire stations significantly influence the efficiency of emergency response during fire accidents. This paper presents an approach to suitably situating new fire stations, considering multiple objectives, using geographic information systems GIS and ANT, a novel Ant algorithm. The efficiency of the current fire station locations in covering HAZMAT transport routes is studied using a GIS. The ANT algorithm is implemented within a GIS environment to locate the additional fire stations so as to reduce the response time to an accident occurring on HAZMAT transport routes from 8 to 5 min. Other considerations include incorporating proper distance among fire stations and maximizing the area that can be served by these fire stations in 6 min. Computational experiments reveal that the proposed algorithm performs stably under different parameter settings and outperforms the conventional genetic algorithm. Furthermore, the integration of GIS with ANT offers enhanced spatial analytical capabilities, and our approach can be employed to solve further intricate optimization problems in transportation and infrastructure. DOI: 10.1061/ ASCE 0887-3801 2006 20:5 361 CE Database subject headings: Optimization; Geographic information systems; Fires; Emergency services; Hazardous materials; Singapore; Transportation.