Fire Crewing Model

The Fire Crewing Model is a computer simulation model that accurately mimics how a Fire & Rescue Services manages its crewing. It enables the impact on fire fighter numbers and hence costs to be consider under a range of scenarios, including:

Policies for management of simultaneous leave
The amount of pooling of resource and the use of personnel reserve.
The impact of station closure or merger
Introduction of appliances with different crewing requirements

FCM is designed to be used in conjunction with our Fire Incident Response Simulator and XIMES shift pattern design software.

Benefits

Consistent achievement of appliance availability
More efficient use of resources
Improved management of abstraction giving benefits to fire fighters and the business

Releasing fire fighters for community protection in Hampshire

Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service have used FCM to examine the impact of ‘turning the crewing dial down’ – i.e. reducing the amount of fire fighters employed to cover for planned and unplanned fire fighter abstraction. Over £1m of efficiency saving was ientified, which was initially realised in the form of increased community safety activity funded by releasing fire fighters from the front line. A paper detailing this work was presented by then Chief Fire Officer John Bonney at the Fire and Rescue Interntational Conference in Atlanta and may be accessed via the link below.

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