Real-Time Monitoring and Evaluation Software for Fire Department Applications: A Systematic Literature Review

Dr. S. Ranjitha
Associate Professor, Department of Information Technology
CMS College of Science and Commerce, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

Sanofar K
Student, Department of Information Technology
CMS College of Science and Commerce, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

Karthikraja N
Student, Department of Information Technology
CMS College of Science and Commerce, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

Lakshitha K
Student, Department of Information Technology
CMS College of Science and Commerce, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

Ramya G
Student, Department of Information Technology
CMS College of Science and Commerce, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

Abstract
Fire departments worldwide are under increasing pressure to detect incidents earlier, dispatch resources faster, and evaluate operational performance more rigorously, driving rapid growth in software and sensor technologies purpose-built for fire and emergency services; the global fire department software market alone grew from an estimated 2.34 billion US dollars in 2023 to 2.61 billion dollars in 2024. This paper presents a systematic literature review of real-time monitoring and evaluation software for fire department applications, organising the field into Internet-of-Things (IoT) based fire detection and sensor networks, machine-learning-based fire and wildfire detection, real-time emergency response and public safety alert architectures, computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and GIS-based response optimisation, and federated and edge-computing approaches to distributed fire monitoring. The review examines a recent, empirically validated real-time IoT-based public safety alert system as a detailed case study, alongside the response-time performance criteria established by the National Fire Protection Association's NFPA 1710 standard, which remains the dominant benchmark against which fire department software and operational performance are evaluated in the reviewed literature. The paper discusses cross-cutting challenges including false-alarm rates, interoperability between legacy and modern CAD systems, connectivity limitations in rural and low-bandwidth coverage areas, data privacy in sensor-rich environments, and the resource constraints facing smaller and volunteer fire departments. The paper concludes by proposing a conceptual layered architecture for real-time fire department monitoring and evaluation software that integrates sensor-level detection, edge and cloud analytics, dispatch optimisation, and standards-based performance evaluation, and by outlining directions for future research.

Keywords: fire department software, real-time monitoring, computer-aided dispatch, IoT, fire detection, emergency response evaluation, NFPA 1710