A greedy heuristic algorithm to solve a VRP-based model for planning and coordinating multiple resources in emergency response to bushfires

Uncoordinated responses have always caused problems in any kind of operation, in particular, for crucial circumstances it is considerable. As uncoordinated responses in bushfire are also associated with decreased efficiency, effectiveness, and safety, we proposed a new VRP-based mathematical coordination model for routing and allocating resources in fire suppression phase of a bushfire event. The focus of this paper is to plan and coordinate the available resources (ground and aerial resources) for efficient fire suppression. problem is NP-hard, but due to the crucial circumstances of bushfire it should be solved in a reasonable time. Therefore, we proposed an efficient greedy heuristic to solve it. We presented test cases with different characteristics that in those that CPLEX can solve them, the results are compared with the solution of the heuristic. We considered a unit of fire within an incident as a fire site. CPLEX fails to solve cases with more than three fire sites, but the proposed greedy heuristic solves cases with 9 fire sites in less than 1 minute. As the optimality RPD of the heuristic is 00.00% for the first three cases and it is also ignorable in the next two cases, it indicates that our algorithm is reliable.