Citation

Higgins A, Whitten S, Slijepcevic A, Fogarty L, Laredo L. Int. J. Wildland Fire 2011; 20(2): 175-183.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, International Association of Wildland Fire, Fire Research Institute, Publisher CSIRO Publishing)

DOI

10.1071/WF09103

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Burning of fine fuels is a crucial activity in Australia as part of reducing the severity of bushfires. Seasonal planning of such planned burning is a very complex task owing to the large number of practical considerations and uncertainty of burn conditions, as well as personnel and equipment resource constraints. Practical considerations include the small number of suitable burn days for different types of burns, as well as different fuel hazard and burn types. This requires careful management of very high resource requirements during the available days. We developed a tool that will use all of the above variables to estimate the resource requirements for different levels of planned burning program. We provide a mathematical programming approach to help plan burning crews and equipment resource requirements in each district by month to minimise likely personnel requirements, under seasonal uncertainty. A key feature is that it accommodates maximum daily resource demands given uncertainty in available burn days and overlap between geographical districts. We implemented the model on a real-world problem of public land across Victoria, and solved it to optimality using GAMS/Cplex 9.

Language: en