An Integrated Framework for Control and Management of Forest Fires Using Potential Fire Risk Indices

Abstract: The objective of this research is to develop an integrated methodology for forest fire control, mainly addressing the problem of how to locate and deploy firefighting brigades in order to maximize the protected area considering its different classes; that is, to maximize the weighted sum of the number of available resources for the region, respecting the time limit of the arrival of the resources to extinguish the fire. The distributed resources should cover the most considerable amount of the geographic area previously classified for its importance level. This methodology integrates (i) a geographical information system (GIS), (ii) a module that computes risk maps of the study zone based on important indices from literature such as the fire potential index, the ignition index, the dynamic behavior index, and the energetic sub-index, (iii) a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) module, and (iv) a post-processing module. The MILP module applies a branch-and-bound algorithm to determine the optimal location of the resources. The overall solution methodology is illustrated and discussed in a case study from the state of Chiapas, Mexico