Coordinating aerial resources and ground crews as the expendable and nonexpendable resources in fire suppression operations

Bushfires have become a critical disaster in our life for a few decades that cause a huge amount of losses. To overcome them and reduce the losses, we should find out the main problem. An effective way in all complex systems is collaboration and coordinated activities between its members. Also, two main parts of fire suppression teams are aerial resources and ground crews. Therefore, we proposed a new model based on Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) to coordinate these resources by considering the capability of unloading and reloading for aerial resources and resting time for ground crews. The objective function is minimizing total suppression time. We also evaluated the performance of our proposed mathematical model by solving ten numerical examples using the CPLEX solver. Finally, we showed that our proposed model is useful in many other situations.

Keywords:

Coordination , Vehicle routing problem (VRP) , Bushfire suppression , Loading and reloading (pickup and delivery) , Expendable and non-expendable resources , Resting time