  Fire stations are among the most crucial emergency facilities in urban
emergency control system in terms of their quick response to fires and other
emergencies. Location plannings for fire stations have a significant influence
on their effectiveness and capability of emergency responses trading off with
the cost of constructions. To obtain efficient and practical siting plans for
fire stations, various major requirements including effectiveness maximization,
distance constraint and workload limitation are required to be considered in
location models, especially for multi-level fire facility systems with macro
and micro fire stations having specific aims and construction requirements.
This paper proposes a novel hierarchical optimization approach taking all the
major requirements for location planning into consideration and bonds
functional connections between different levels of fire stations at the same
time. A single-objective and a multi-objective optimization model are
established to solve the location siting problems for macro and micro fire
stations simultaneously. Genetic algorithm with elitist reservation and
Pareto-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm are adopted to solve the
problem with NP-hard nature. The proposed hierarchical location model is
further performed in a case study of Futian District in Shenzhen, and the
siting result justifies the effectiveness and practicality of our novel
approach.
