Assisted Resource Management in the New Zealand Rural Fire Service

Abstract

There exists a need for more efficient tools and processes for use in the emergency services. Of particular interest to the authors of this report and to our industry sponsor, Tait Communications, is the idea of resource management. Resources retained by the emergency services include vehicles, personnel, specialist equipment and tools, and medical and disaster relief supplies. The nature of an emergency mandates a swift response, and thus it is necessary for such resources to be maintained in a state of constant readiness. Existing processes for achieving this are manual and often incur high overheads. In this report we detail our creation of a resource management application for use in the New Zealand Rural Fire Service. The application was created as a prototype for demonstrating the potential of such a system in order to facilitate further discussion with interested parties. We approached this project with a complete software engineering product lifecycle, from consultation, planning and risk analysis to prototyping, implementation and evaluation. We produced a functional prototype which was positively received by our industry sponsor, who acted as a proxy customer for the purposes of the project. We thus concluded that our work was successful, and have conclusively demonstrated the utility of a resource management application for use in the emergency services.