Abstract

Determining staffing requirements for a fire station is quite difficult as one must balance between the cost of additional human resources and the risk of not having an effective force to respond to a given incident. This paper presents an application of a novel AHP-based methodology, incorporating multiple decision makers and multiple decisions, to fire station staffing in a large residential and industrial complex. A new practical and comprehensive model is formulated for fire station staffing. The model can be summarized as a two-stage approach. The first stage is applying AHP to each decision and each decision maker. The second stage is integrating the individual decisions in order to reach group consensus in both decisions. A novel technique is used to assign weights to different decision makers based on their varying consistency levels. The proposed method is simple but effective, and it allows for the objective assessment of the alternatives and for providing a ranking of the multiple decisions. The method utilizes the fact that no decision maker is perfectly consistent, and hence it gives higher weights to decision makers with greater degrees of consistency. The method integrates the different decisions into a ranked arrangement for final decisions using the weighted scores for the combination of decision alternatives.