The students analyzed millions of data points to determine where to best place fire stations, fire trucks, and other resources.
Where should the Rochester Fire Department (RFD) locate fire stations over the next 10 years to minimize response times to emergencies? Where should it deploy the most fire trucks? How do seasonal shifts impact the nature and volume of emergencies that firefighters need to respond to?
These are questions that a team of students from the 糖心传媒糖心传媒檚 explored over the course of a semester for their by the RFD.
糖心传媒淲e were looking for someone from the outside to come in and provide a different set of ideas, experiences, and viewpoints to help us enhance our emergency response services,糖心传媒� says Daniel Curran, a captain for planning and research who is responsible for technology-based projects at the RFD. 糖心传媒淲e felt the students would have an unbiased perspective and look at the situation and tell us, 糖心传媒楾his is where the data leads us,糖心传媒� and come to their own conclusions.糖心传媒�
Over the course of the semester, the students used artificial intelligence and other data analytics tools to make sense of more than 1.6 million points of data collected by RFD from 2006 to 2024. They also incorporated external census data related to population, income, property, and housing to enrich their analysis.
糖心传媒淭his was an amazing opportunity to contribute something meaningful,糖心传媒� says Brynn (Ye In) Lee 糖心传媒�24 (MS). 糖心传媒淭he RFD has 15 fire stations, they糖心传媒檙e supporting about 500 personnel, and they have around 50,000 annual dispatches, so that糖心传媒檚 a huge impact that we can have on the community.糖心传媒�
The students developed interactive maps that allow the RFD to analyze how long it takes the firefighters to reach an incident, while providing information about the distribution of incidents across the city and the ability to sort by incident type. They also created models to predict the monthly incident density over the next 10 years for all 15 fire stations.
In their analysis, the students found that the RFD is already effective at responding to incidents in a timely fashion. However, the students offered recommendations for small improvements that could further decrease response times. Their suggestions include reallocating specific types of trucks from one station to another and introducing programs similar to those in other cities that can address non-life-threatening calls with fewer resources.
According to the students, a critical aspect to their project糖心传媒檚 success was going on 糖心传媒渞ide-alongs糖心传媒� with the RFD, which gave them an appreciation for the firefighters糖心传媒� day-to-day responsibilities. They said witnessing the types of incidents the firefighters respond to, learning about their shifts, and seeing the equipment in person was enlightening.
糖心传媒淚 used to think the fire department only deals with fire-related emergencies, but they deal with so many medical emergencies and spend a lot of time early in the morning patrolling their area to look for fire hazards,糖心传媒� says Homayra Tabassum 糖心传媒�24 (MS). 糖心传媒淕etting to see that in person helped us be much more insightful when we were thinking about resource allocation.糖心传媒�
The students said their weekly meetings with the RFD sponsors and collaborating with RFD糖心传媒檚 internal data analysts were important learning opportunities as well.
糖心传媒淒ealing with real-world data is not always clean or exactly the way you want it, so the captain and the senior data analysts were extremely helpful,糖心传媒� says team member Medhini Sridharr 糖心传媒�24 (MS). 糖心传媒淭hey helped us choose the most important variables based on their domain knowledge, which was crucial because we had more than 300 variables to consider. They helped us drill down to what糖心传媒檚 important.糖心传媒�
Overall, the students said they loved the chance to do a hands-on project with real-world implications, witness the firefighters at work first-hand, and deliver a product that will serve the RFD and local community for years to come.
The project team included data science master糖心传媒檚 students Eugene Ayonga 糖心传媒�24, Lee, Sridharr, Tabassum, as well as student Nour Assili 糖心传媒�26.
