Response Time Analysis of Firefighting Operations Using Discrete Event Simulation

This paper reports the results of applying discrete event simulation on fire fighting operations in the State of Kuwait. The objective is to reduce the response times to reach fires in all districts to below five minutes. Other performance measures included response time/utilization, number of incidents exceeding ten minutes/utilization. Both are critical for decision making. An improved system reduced the average response from 7.3 minutes to around 3 minutes. The Simulation of the output runs were analyzed using ANOVA. The results were validated at 95% confidence level. Simulation turned to be an excellent tool for testing different alternatives efficiently without disturbing ongoing fire fighting operations.