Simulation of alternative drive forms for technology evaluation in fire protection demand planning

Our customer, a large plant fire department in Germany, commissioned us with the evaluation of alternative drive forms for the accessibility of their site. niologic carried out simulations of trip time and accessibility with their software Premergency and compared several drive forms. Resulting optimizations were later implemented using Google TensorFlow.

Challenge

The plant fire department required an assessment of the significance of different drive systems for the expansion of the company location and their own choice of location. The question was whether fire-fighting vehicles with electric motors or very high-acceleration internal combustion engines would offer advantages in terms of area coverage over already well-motored vehicles.

Procedure

niologic carried out the investigation as a simulation, as renting and delivering of the respective vehicles was ruled out as too time-consuming. The road network of the factory premises was imported into Premergency. Also, acceleration profiles of the vehicles to be examined were entered into the software. In addition, road profiles and permitted maximum speeds were stored. In the subsequent analysis step, the minimum possible trip time was calculated for each point on the factory site. Crossing and turning processes were also taken into account. Intersections with priority rules were considered accordingly.

For this purpose, the software Premergency software contains powerful algorithms for mathematical optimization and graph theory. The results of the trip time simulation were visualized as an isochrone map for each vehicle type. The maximum time savings to be expected for emergency deployments could thus be displayed clearly. To automatically optimize the fire department’s performance, trip time simulation was done by matrix-based optimization within Google TensorFlow.

Result and customer value

By simulating the trip times, the customer was able to evaluate the significance of different drive forms prior to a possible vehicle configuration and order. The future significance of new (electric) drive forms in firefighting thus became clear at an early stage.

For the dialogue with the vehicle manufacturers, additional facts for the further development of firefighter-friendly engines could thus be found. The importance of the choice of location could also be demonstrated to the customer at an early stage with regard to expected future vehicle technologies so that the customer can strategically and operationally control both procurement and construction.