6-minutes

Inspiration

In an emergency, every second matters. Whether it is a building fire, a serious medical incident or a police emergency, the time it takes for the right team to arrive can change the outcome completely.

We wanted to explore a simple question: what if emergency services could make better decisions before an incident happens, rather than simply reacting after it does?

6-Minutes was inspired by the opportunity to use data, predictive modelling and simulation to understand how emergency services could respond more effectively, allocate limited resources and potentially save more lives.

What it does

6-Minutes is an emergency response optimisation platform designed to help public services make faster, smarter and more informed decisions.

The platform covers three emergency departments: fire, police and health. Its central idea is to compare existing response strategies with alternative scenarios generated by our model.

Users can explore simulations, adjust parameters such as budget and geographical area, and see how different resource allocation decisions could affect emergency response times and public safety.

Our initial working implementation focuses on fire services in London, exploring how fire station closures, fire engine positioning and resource allocation could affect response times. Police and health represent the wider potential of the platform.

Rather than simply displaying statistics, 6-Minutes aims to make the consequences of operational decisions understandable through clear visualisations, scenario comparisons and actionable insights.

How we built it

We built 6-Minutes as a web-based platform with a focus on making complex emergency planning decisions accessible and understandable.

The frontend provides an interactive interface where users can explore emergency scenarios, adjust simulation parameters and compare different outcomes. The backend supports the underlying data processing and modelling.

Our approach centres on data-driven simulation, using historical incident information, geographical factors and estimated travel times to explore how alternative deployment strategies might perform against existing approaches.

We designed the platform around three key questions: what is happening now, what could happen under a different strategy, and what would that change mean for the public?

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was turning a complex operational problem into something people could actually understand and use.

Emergency response involves many interconnected variables, including station locations, available vehicles, road networks, incident severity, resource availability and travel times. Presenting all of this without overwhelming users required us to rethink the interface and structure the simulator around clear, step-by-step decisions.

Another challenge was distinguishing realistic predictions from hypothetical improvements. A simulation can demonstrate how a strategy might perform under certain assumptions, but its results need to be grounded in reliable data and validated before they can support real operational decisions.

We also had to consider how a single platform could accommodate fire, police and health services, which have different operational requirements, without pretending that one model works identically for all three.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We brought together emergency response modelling, interactive simulation and public-impact analysis into one platform.

We are particularly proud of our focus on comparing decisions rather than just presenting data. By allowing users to explore alternative scenarios, 6-Minutes makes it easier to investigate how resource allocation and deployment strategies could influence emergency response.

We also established a foundation that can extend beyond fire services to police and health, with the longer-term goal of supporting better coordination and decision-making across emergency departments.

Most importantly, we approached the problem from the perspective of the public: the ultimate measure of a better emergency response system is not just a better statistic, but whether it can help people receive the right assistance when they need it.

What we learned

We learned that building a useful predictive tool requires more than a sophisticated model. The quality of the underlying data, the assumptions used in simulations and the way results are communicated all matter.

We also learned that comparing a proposed strategy against a baseline is essential. Showing a predicted response time on its own means little without explaining what it is being compared against, what assumptions were made and how uncertainty affects the result.

Finally, we learned that emergency response is not just a technical problem. It involves difficult decisions about limited budgets, geographical coverage, operational constraints and public safety. Technology can help decision-makers understand these trade-offs, but credible results must always come before bold claims.

What's next for 6-Minutes

Our next step is to strengthen the London fire response simulator by incorporating more reliable historical incident data, realistic road-network travel times and resource availability constraints.

We want to evaluate alternative station configurations and fire engine deployment strategies, measuring not only average response times but also the proportion of incidents reached within target times, geographical coverage and the impact on underserved communities.

We then aim to develop dedicated modelling approaches for police and health services, before exploring how insights across departments could support more coordinated emergency planning.

Longer term, we want 6-Minutes to become a decision-support platform that helps emergency services test ideas before implementing them, understand the consequences of resource allocation decisions and identify opportunities to improve public safety.

Our goal is simple: help emergency services make every second count.