Mathematical Programming and the Location of Fire Companies for the Denver Fire Department

An operations research study of fire company location in Denver, Colorado, has been conducted, resulting in recommendations that may reduce annual costs by more than one million dollars without a substantial change in the level of fire-suppression capability. One development resulting from this study is a hierarchical objective function for the set-covering problem; this objective function permits the simultaneous minimization of the number of fire stations and the maximization of the number of existing fire stations within the minimum total number of stations. This paper includes discussions of the use of mathematical programming, station configuration information models, the synergism of judgment and analysis, and the action that resulted from the recommendations.