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Abstract
Pune city is growing at a very fast rate and the city core , but containing a major share of residential as well as commercial development and is marked by high densities, narrow roads, heavy traffic and paucity of open spaces.The present study was aimed at achieving three objectives:

1. To develop a visualization technique (map animation) to analyze the nature of fire incidents by their type, their spatial distribution, their variation over time in Arcview using its scripting language ‘Avenue’.
2. To analyze the effectiveness of the existing fire station network in terms of their serve-ability or reach-ability for different response times (eg., 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 minutes) and find out the time required to serve the entire area assuming the average speed of the fire vehicle to be 30 km/hr.
3. Development of a Arcview customized application which would improve the decision making of the fire brigade personnel especially with reference to routing with a easy to use interface.

The Roads layer, the Fire Stations layer and the Hospitals layer was generated from commercially available map of Pune city at a scale of 1:50000. The costs for traveling the roads were given on a scale of 1 to 10 based on a report of the study of traffic density conducted by the Traffic Control Branch, Pune Municipal Corporation. Past Fire Incidents Layer generated from data provided by the Central Fire Brigade, Pune Municipal Corporation. The data provided contained details of 1100 fire incidents dated from 25/08/2001 to 24/02/2002, out of which only 346 were inside the study area. The address of the fire incidents provided by the Central Fire Brigade, Pune Municipal Corporation was the most detailed form of spatial reference available in the data. The addresses were not suitable for automatic geocoding; consequently a labour intensive manual process was conducted using a combination of the commercially available map, and other street atlases. Since some addresses could not be precisely located the number of incidents that were finally plotted was 235. These incidents were further used for analysis and visualization.

1) Map animation
The use of animation as a means of data presentation and visualization of information is increasing with the diffusion of ‘multi media technology’. Map Animation techniques have been applied in the social geography arena to analyze crime incidents, epidemiology and urban growth. In the current study an attempt was made to visualize the fire incidents and their spatial and temporal patterns in the form of an animated map. It was hypothesized that patterns across space and time would be evident in the fire incident database. Arcview 3.2a was used to test this hypothesis. The fire incidents layer (point map), the roads layer and the river layer was used in the production of the animated map. This was achieved through Avenue Scripting, to generate the individual map frames for each time interval that was provided in the script (a one hour time interval was chosen for the present study), saving them to small graphic files (exporting the view document to JPEG format) before feeding them to the animation software. The resulting map animation can be played back independently of its creation using a suitable animation player like windows media player, which is part of the standard windows installation.

After the generation of the animation, spatial as well as temporal trends were observed in the dataset. It was observed that in certain areas the number of occurrences was fairly high to observe the spatial trend. These were the areas that were highly congested, mostly slums and areas of high densities. The high-class localities showed a remarkably less number of fire occurrences. Clusters were evident in the city center, which is highly congested. Incidents are not evenly distributed over time, with distinct concentrations at certain periods. There is also a marked variation in incidents in terms of time of day. For all types of incidents the peak is between about 11 to 12 and 16.00 and 20.00 hours, with very few incidents during the 24.00 to 08.00 period. This is closely related to activity patterns of the mass of the population.

2) Efficiency of existing fire station network:
Network Analysis using Arcview 3.2a was performed to assess the efficiency of the existing fire station network in terms of the minimum response time needed to serve the entire study area by the four Fire Stations. The speed of travel of the fire tender was assumed at an average of 30 km/hr and the service area for each Fire Station was calculated for different minimum response times viz.,3, 4, 5, 6, …11 minutes, using the ‘find service area’ function of Arcview 3.2a. It was found that the four fire stations were able to serve the whole area in a matter of 11 minutes.

3) Custom application development:
The custom project was divided into two modules viz., the Fire Emergency Module and the Roads Information Module. The former gives routing solutions on the input of point of incidence and the latter having detailed information about roads and built in queries.

Arcview’s Dialog Designer extension was used to create the dialog boxes and avenue scripts were attached to them for performing given tasks. For the automation of Network Routing, buttons and tools were added to the View document and the roads information dialog box was created using label buttons, tools and listboxes. A roads information module was also incorporated because of the availability of very detailed roads information, with built in queries, which would enable the user to get information about a particular road on the click of a button. The custom interface was developed keeping in mind its use by the Central Fire Brigade Personnel.