Development of an Information System to Support Decision-Making for Fire Dispatcher

Abstract

The article addresses the development of a software product designed to automate decision-making in response to fires and other emergency situations (hereinafter referred to as ES). The article analyses the state of response to fires and other ES in fire and rescue unit management bodies, revealing a number of problematic issues associated with the insufficient effectiveness of the management process, primarily at the stage of processing incoming information and adopting the most optimal decision based on the evolving situation. These factors include: incompleteness and unreliability of primary information, complex traffic conditions leading to a reduction in the time before rescue operations commence, an insufficient level of interagency coordination, etc. The analysis of scientific publications has shown that the majority of studies focus on reducing response time and improving management and routing through statistical and simulation modelling, since it is the reduction of response time that has a direct impact on the number of people rescued and, consequently, on the reduction of fatalities. It has been established that at the stage of receiving reports by the fire service dispatcher, it is possible to reduce the time required for processing incoming information through automation by creating an information system to support decision-making by the fire service dispatcher. This solution will not only relieve the dispatcher of performing numerous routine operations involving the manual retrieval, analysis and systematisation of information, but will also help to avoid errors when deciding on the deployment of forces and resources. To address the identified problematic issue, the authors propose a software product aimed at automating the management of firefighting equipment and coordinating the actions of units during fire suppression. The programme can be used in fire stations for the automatic identification and selection of equipment based on the fire rank, response area and muster roll data, as well as for the instantaneous verification of a fire address against the existing database of fire suppression plans and cards and access to them for obtaining the characteristics of the protected facility. During the analysis of the software product's performance results, its high effectiveness was demonstrated in terms of accomplishing the task of forming a dispatch order, reducing the number of manual operations performed by the dispatcher, and evaluating the time required to access fire suppression cards. According to all the above criteria, a comparative assessment established a reduction in information processing time and a decrease in the number of manual operations. When assessing the degree of conformity of the automatically generated list to the regulatory requirements, it was found that the average conformity value exceeded 99 %, which indicates a high degree of reliability of the algorithm as a whole.