Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Travel time is a major but complicated component of the response time of a fire brigade. It depends primarily on the travel distance, and is influenced by not only environmental factors such as road conditions and weather, but also the actions taken by the vehicles that share the road with the fire engine. In this paper, two models, the safety model and the balance model, have been developed to describe the way-yielding actions of common vehicles. A Cellular Automaton has been occupied to simulate the traveling of a fire engine on a two-lane road, with the common vehicles’ actions model integrated in. The simulation results prove that both models exist in real life, and show that the way-yielding actions taken by common vehicles close to the fire engine affect the travel time, especially in some firehouse-scarce districts.