Determining Optimal Asset Location for Rapid and Efficient Wildfire Suppression: A Simulation-Based Approach

The impact of wildfire incidents has been growing in recent years, posing a serious threat to communities at the urban-wildland interface. To address this problem, there have been growing calls to use UAVs to increase the capacity of responsible agencies to quickly and effectively suppress fires and to reduce risks associated with firefighting. One of the opportunities associated with UAVs is the ability to rapidly and autonomously operate from limited-access air bases where fires are expected to burn. This study provides an approach to determine where these air bases should be placed in order to most rapidly extinguish fires, given provided fuel distributions. This approach uses an integrated simulation of fire propagation and UAV-based suppression
actions to determine how much of a given environment was burned over a range of scenarios. It then uses an optimization method to explore the space and determine the location with the least burned area. Results show the approach to efficiently and effectively provide optimal bases for
single-base placements over a range of scenarios, though future work is required to adequately calibrate the model and study how it can be used in multiple-base placement problems.