Minimizing the total weighted tardiness in wildfire suppression

In scheduling fire fighting resource problems, increasing time is required to control a fire if the beginning of the containment effort is delayed. A fire has escaped initial attack if its containment time exceeds a specific ‘containment escape time limit’, which can be calculated at its ignition time. These times can be considered as due dates. The problem of scheduling a single fire fighting resource when there are multiple forest fires to be suppressed is considered in this paper, in the case where the objective is to minimize the total weighted tardiness in wildfire suppression. A model of the problem is presented, one fast to calculate lower bound for the problem tackled is shown and a heuristic algorithm is used for the extraction of an upper bound of the solution.