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The purpose of this research is to review literature about the performance assessment (PA) in urban fire departments (FDs) to gain state-of-the-art of the fire departments' performance assessment (FDPA) and identify its most applied methods and indicators.

A five-stage structured literature review (SLR) is conducted to review the FDPA-related studies; then, the statistical analysis is applied to reveal more information from the extracted data and design a general framework for FDPA.

The systematic literature review resulted in 336 independent variables for FDPA and finding the data envelopment analysis (DEA) as the most applied FDPA method among the mathematical and statistical models in the reviewed papers. By using analysis outcomes, a general conceptual framework for FDPA is proposed.

The reviewed studies were limited to …