The location set covering problem continues to be an important and challenging spatial optimization problem. The range of practical planning applications underscores its importance, spanning fire station siting, warning siren positioning, security monitoring and nature reserve design, to name but a few. It is challenging on a number of fronts. First, it can be difficult to solve for medium to l...

The abandonment of land, the high energy load generated and accumulated by vegetation covers, climate change and interface scenarios in Mediterranean forest ecosystems are demanding serious attention to forest fire conditions. This is particularly true when dealing with the budget requirements for undertaking protection programs related to the state of current and future forest landscapes. Base...

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been used mainly to collect environmental data and send it to a base station. Routing protocols are needed to efficiently direct the information flows to the base station. Since sensor nodes have strict energy constraints, data gathering and communication schemes for WSNs need to be designed for an efficient utilization of the available resources. An emergen...

We study the on-line minimum weighted bipartite matching problem in arbitrary metric spaces. Here, n not necessary disjoint points of a metric space M are given, and are to be matched on-line with n points of M revealed one by one. The cost of a matching is the sum of the distances of the matched points, and the goal is to find or approximate its minimum. The competitive ratio of the determinis...

OBJECTIVE To describe effects of 2 worksite health promotion programs for firefighters, both immediate outcomes and the long-term consequences for 4 years following the interventions. METHODS At baseline, 599 firefighters were assessed, randomized by fire station to control and 2 different intervention conditions, and reevaluated with 6 annual follow-up measurements. RESULTS Both a team-cen...

Wind changes, and particularly wind changes that are associated with dry cold fronts, have profound effects on fire behaviour and fire-fighting operations (e.g. Cheney et al. 2001). Huang and Mills (2006b) (hereafter Part 1) have reported on the first stage of a larger scale project that aims to improve the understanding and prediction of wind changes in Australia. In Part 1 a method of objecti...

This study is motivated by the need for a micro-geographic information system (GIS) to represent and analyze 3D spatial data for the plotting of fire-fighting search and rescue routes within buildings. The GIS uses a 3D geometric network model (GNM) and the Dijkstra algorithm to consider smoke movement during different times of a building fire. Therefore, the route calculation algorithm can avo...

We assess the usability of public inquiry report data to build a formal trace that can be used in later stages to create an agent model simulating crisis response coordination. The case taken is a train tunnel fire near the underground train station at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol that turned out to be harmless, but the incident illustrated key weaknesses in inter-organizational coordination caus...

The correct and quick evacuation of occupants is very important for the save of lives in a public building when it is attacked by a fire. However, it is difficult to train the occupants for evacuation in a real environment since it is dangerous and expensive. This paper presents a virtual reality system developed by the authors for the simulation of occupant evacuation in an underground station...