Forest Fire Management

Abstract

Forest fire management systems share much in common with urban fire, police and ambulance systems, but the spatial and temporal variability of forest fire occurrence processes and the comparatively long distances over which forest fire management takes place pose special challenges to operational researchers. This chapter describes the basic structure of a forest fire management system and the decision-making problems faced by fire managers. It describes how operations research (OR) has been applied to forest fire prevention, detection, deployment and initial attack dispatch decision-making problems; large fire management, strategic planning and fuel management, and it identifies new challenges that are amenable to OR approaches.