Resource‐Constrained Emergency Scheduling for Forest Fires with Priority Areas: An Efficient Integer‐Programming Approach

Abstract

This article deals with an emergency‐scheduling problem for forest fires with limited rescue team resources and priority disaster areas. It aims to determine optimal fire‐fighting routes of limited fire‐fighting teams for forest fires with multiple points subject to their priority levels so as to minimize the total travel distance of all rescue teams. For this problem, an integer linear‐programming (ILP) model is developed to generate its optimal schedule scheme, which is exactly solved by commercial software CPLEX. Moreover, the complexity of the problem is proved to be NP‐hard. Computational results show that benchmark and larger‐scale instances (with up to 100 fire points and 30 fire‐fighting teams) can be exactly solved within about 1 min and the proposed approach outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art one in terms of solution quality and computational time. The experimental results suggest that the proposed approach is potentially suitable for facilitating fast decision‐making when dealing with emergency scheduling for forest fires subject to limited rescue resources. Moreover, a new mixed‐integer program is developed to address the resource‐constrained emergency scheduling for forest fires with priority areas to minimize the total rescue time. © 2018 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.