Firefighter scheduling problem: a case study in a fire station

Abstract

How to schedule a limited number of firefighters at a fire department that operates 24 hours a day is a critical issue for conducting firefighting, emergency, and rescue operations safely and effectively. The firefighter Scheduling Problem (FSP) is one of the application problems in staff scheduling, which has been extensively studied in operations research and artificial intelligence. FSP is a combinatorial constraint optimization problem where the objective is to find an assignment that satisfies all hard constraints and minimizing the sum of all violated soft constraints. The satisfaction level of firefighters is a crucial criterion for enhancing their working environment. In this paper, a formal framework for the FSP is defined. The experiments involve formulating the FSP as a 0-1 integer programming problem, which is solved using real data from a fire department in Hyogo Prefecture. Two solutions are presented: optimal and egalitarian solutions, which are then compared to an actual schedule.