The wildfire suppression problem with multiple types of resources

Abstract

The frequency and impact of wildfires have considerably increased in the past decade, due to the extreme weather conditions as well as the increased population density. The aim of this study is to introduce, model, and solve a wildfire suppression problem that involves multiple types of fire suppression resources and their operational characteristics. Two integer programming (IP) formulations, a basic IP and its reformulation with combinatorial Benders’ cuts, are presented. The performances of the proposed formulations are evaluated on a set of randomly generated instances. The results indicate that the proposed formulations are able to obtain high quality upper and lower bounds. Extensive numerical experiments are performed to analyse the effects of several operational constraints on the computational performance of the models. A case study arising in Yatağan district of Muğla province of Türkiye is presented.