A Constructive Heuristic for Dispatching and Routing Firefighting Resources to Attack Multiple Fires

Abstract Forest fires are natural phenomena that have become increasingly serious in recent decades. It has therefore become essential to manage firefighting in order to prevent and reduce the damage caused by fires, such as loss of life, the impact on the economy, and damage to ecosystems. In order to reduce the impact of a fire, firefighting resources must be available and deployed to extinguish a given ignition in order to be as effective as possible in fighting fires. In this work, we address the problem of dispatching and routing a set of resources to attack multiple fires. Given the need for quick decisions, we propose a constructive heuristic. The approach is based on a time discretization and on estimates of the growth of the different fires. The heuristic has the advantage of producing results in a short time, indicating where and when each resource should move to extinguish the fire, so that the burned area is as small as possible. A set of 60 instances, comprising 5, 7, and 10 resources to extinguish 20 and 30 ignitions, is generated to test and validate four variants of the constructive heuristic. A case study in northern Portugal is presented to demonstrate the practical feasibility of the proposed approach. The results showed the effectiveness of the constructive heuristic, which may be used to support firefighting services in making decisions.