Decision Support Models and Methodologies for Fire Suppression

Abstract

Wildfires are recurrent natural events that have been increasing in frequency and severity in recent decades. They threaten human lives and damage ecosystems and infrastructure, leading to high recovery costs. To address the issue of wildfires, several activities must be managed and coordinated in order to develop a suitable response that is both effective and affordable. This includes actions taken before (mitigation, prevention, and preparedness), during (response), and after the event (recovery). Considering the available resources and the safety of the involved personnel is a key aspect. This article is a review focused on fire suppression, which comprises actions belonging to the preparedness phase (deployment) and the response phase (dispatching) of the wildfire management scheme. It goes through the models and methodologies that, applying operations research and optimization techniques, address the management of resources to address fire suppression. This article presents a review of the studies published after the last review on the topic in 2017, but also includes some interesting papers before that date. It concludes with some classifying tables and a few conclusions about possible future lines of research.

Keywords

• fire suppression
• wildfires
• decision making
• optimization
• operations research