Deploying Wildland Fire Suppression Resources with a Scenario-Based Standard Response Model

Wildland fire managers deploy suppression resources to bases and dispatch them to fires to maximize the percentage of fires that are successfully contained before unacceptable costs and losses occur. Deployment is made with budget constraints and uncertainty about the daily number, location, and intensity of fires, all of which affect initial–attack success. To address the deployment problem, we formulate a scenario–based standard response model with two objective functions: the number of suppression resources deployed and the expected daily number of fires that do not receive a standard response, defined as the desired number of resources that can reach the fire within a specified response time. To determine how deployment levels affect the standard response objective, a weighted sum of the objective functions is minimized, and the weights are ramped from large to small to generate the tradeoffs.