Wildfire Management

As more frequent and destructive wildfire events threaten lives and homes, analytical methods can assist in assessing alternatives and making decisions. Nowadays, wildfire managers have access to a large amount of data from a variety of sources including geospatial databases, fire behaviour and climatology models. It is often difficult to interpret these data in a coherent and efficient way. Moreover, managers constantly face a number of challenges that complicate the problem, such as limited time, constrained resources, conflicting objectives, uncertainty and strict constraints of different nature.

Operational research (OR) is a discipline uniquely placed to provide mathematically sound insight in wildfire management. As an example, consider