A fleet management model for the Santiago Fire Department

• We propose a fleet assignment model for the Santiago Fire Department.
• The objective is to maximize the number of incidents successfully attended.
• An improvement of between 6% and 20% could be achieved (objective function).
• Optimizing existing fleet via dynamic reallocation (no new vehicles required).

The Santiago Fire Department (from here referred to as SFD) lacks a fleet management strategy since their vehicles remain allocated in fixed fire stations, while the presence of seasonal patterns suggests that the frequency of events changes according to their geographical distribution. This fact has led to inequitable service in terms of response times among the nine zones of the SFD. In this empirical study we propose a fleet assignment model for the Santiago Fire Department to maximize the number of incidents successfully attended (standard responses). Results suggest that the implementation of the fleet management proposal will lead to an increase in the number of standard responses of between 6% and 20% with respect to the current situation. This increase in performance is especially important since it does not require new vehicles; it just optimizes the existing siting via dynamic reallocation.