Assigning independent resources to fire stations to minimize the influence of the shortage

A new integer program is presented to model an independent resources assignment problem with resource shortages in the context of municipal fire service. When shortage in resources exists, a critical task for fire department's administrator in a city is to assign the available resources to the fire stations such that the effect of the shortage to cover (in providing service, in extinguishing fire and so on) is minimized. To solve the problem, we propose a polynomial time greedy algorithm.