Multi-objective scheduling of priority-based rescue vehicles to extinguish forest fires using a multi-objective discrete gravitational search algorithm

The implementation of emergency scheduling of priority-based rescue vehicles for extinguishing forest fires is a complex optimization problem facing with many challenges and difficulties to optimize the operational costs and to improve the efficiency to make robust decisions. The main challenges are to minimize the number of fire engines while minimizing firefighting time and firefighting delay time, simultaneously. The main difficulties to make these decisions are to consider the severity of each fire point with regards to the limited resources of vehicles. Hence, this paper motivates to develop a new multi-objective scheduling model for extinguishing the fire of forests considering rescue priority with the limited rescue resources. To make an efficient and robust solution for the proposed problem, another novelty is to propose a hybrid optimization algorithm which is a modified discrete gravitational search algorithm. To confirm the applicability of the proposed problem, an actual forest fire emergency scheduling in Heilongjiang Province, China, is simulated. The proposed hybrid optimization algorithm is tested to check the feasibility the Pareto solutions and it is compared with a set of well-known and recent algorithms to show its efficiency. Finally, after a comprehensive discussion, the results prove that this work provides an accurate and effective tool for performing the emergency scheduling for extinguishing the forest fire.