Read the following project summary and answer the questions below:

Angel Hills Fire Department in the city of Angel Hills, Nova Scotia is concerned that they are not meeting the response times required by various governing bodies. Every particular station is required, by law, to exit their building within 75 seconds of receiving an emergency call. They have to exit the building with the proper number of firefighters (which will depend on the type of vehicle) in a registered vehicle and with each crew member wearing the appropriate safety gear (and worn properly so that it can work as intended). The Fire Department Headquarters (FDHQ) is worried that many of their stations are not able to meet this standard.

The FDHQ is not sure what the best way to tackle this problem is so they have asked for some consultants to come in and take a look at their operations. The student consultants had some initial meetings with the head office and firefighters. The FF are feeling the pressure from head office to meet these times and feel they are unreasonable; however, head office feels as though the employees should be meeting the targets already and is not sure why they are not currently doing so. They are somewhat suspicious that this is some kind of strategy to ask for more finances or resources as another collective bargaining agreement has to be made between firefighters and Fire Department management in about six months.

Some discussion with the FF shows that they think there are several issues. Some say that their safety gear is getting old and takes longer than newer gear to put on; some other FF say that the issue is that their shifts are too long and the only time they are late to leave the station is when everyone is asleep. Still others say that the real problem is that many of the fire stations are old and have been renovated several times and the renovations havent always been for the best a lot of make-shift changes were made without realizing the impact they would have on response times. For example, female dorms were added into many of the older stations in the 1980s and 1990s which meant that people were far away from the fire engines when a call was received. Others complain that things that seem silly make a big difference various doors sometimes stick and/or are hard to open, hallways are long and narrow so are hard to rush through, and so on. Some people in different stations complain as well that the kitchen and the common room are too far away from the garage (and therefore the fire trucks) while less-important and rarely-used things such as storage rooms and furnace rooms are very close to the garage. The head office is aware of some of these issues. While they are concerned about the cost of renovating all of their stations, they have recently secured funding to renovate about a dozen old stations and build six new ones near the growing suburban areas of the city.

Both the FF and the FDHQ are hopeful the student consultants will be able to come up with something to help them out by April so they can mitigate the problems they are seeing.

Please answer the questions on the next page.

1. What is/are the major goal(s) of this project?

2. What are some of the most important constraints in this system?

3. What are some potential strategies open to students for moving forward in this project? In other words, what are key Industrial Engineering tools that may help uncover issues with the system? List applicable tools and a brief description of why they would be a good idea to use.

4. What sort of Industrial Engineering problem is this best categorized as? (Inventory, process flow, human factors/ergonomics, queuing, data management, facilities design, quality control, or something else? Or nothing?)

5. Why do you think this problem should fit into this category?