Consistency-Based Multi-Criteria Group Decision-Making for Fire Station Staffing

Determining staffing requirements for a fire station is quite difficult as one must balance 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 new AHP-based method, incorporating multiple decision-makers and multiple decisions, to fire station staffing in a large residential and industrial complex. Anew practical and comprehensive model is formulated for fire station staffing. Moreover, an effective method is developed to integrate multiple decisions and decision-makers in multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM). The paper presents a two-stage decision-making approach. The first stage is applying AHP to each decision and each decision-maker. The second stage is integrating the inputs to reach a group decision using consistency-based weights of individual decision-makers. The method integrates the different decisions into a set of ranked final decisions using the weighted scores for the combination of decision alternatives.