Wildfire Mitigation Using An Aerial Firefighting Vehicle: An Optimal Control Approach

This paper is devoted to an optimal control approach for wildfire mitigation using an aerial firefighting vehicle. It is a distributed nonlinear optimal control problem with a moving actuator for a system composed of a nonlinear advection-diffusion PDE and three ODEs. To my knowledge, this approach is completely new. In this paper, the existence of an optimal solution is assumed for the purpose of numerical demonstration. Based on the formal adjoint method, the paper provides the necessary conditions for optimality of the problem and a preliminary discussion on the system well-posedness and the existence of an optimal solution. It also describes the descent method used to compute a numerical solution. Finally, a case study shows very promising preliminary results.