Operational research and forest fire management resource deployment

Forest fire managers in the province of Ontario, Canada must deal with considerable uncertainty concerning fire occurrence and behavior when they decide upon the daily deployment of fire fighting resources to many bases located across the province. This paper describes how the author and his associates use Operational Research techniques to develop decision support systems that can be used to help decide how detection aircraft, initial attack fire crews, transport helicopters, and airtankers should be deployed over one to three day planning horizons.