System and method for strategic budgeting of initial response for managing wildfires

A system employing stochastic-integer-programming-based constrained optimization technology for developing a strategic budget for allocation of disaster management resources to disaster events belonging to scenarios associated with occurrence probabilities comprising:

• means for providing as input, in a machine-readable data format, a list of fire scenarios with unique IDs for each fire planning unit, and their occurrence probabilities;
• means for providing as input, in a machine-readable data format, a list of fire-groups with unique IDs including simultaneous fires in each scenario for the fire planning unit;
• means for providing as input, in a machine-readable data format, a list of fire events with unique IDs in each fire-group by one or more of fire management unit location, fire intensity level, and sensitivity time period;
• means for providing as input, in a machine-readable data format, a list of fire events by one or more of their respective weights (relative utility in the utility function), burned area cumulative perimeter growth by time period, and burned area cumulative acres growth by time period;
• means for providing as input, in a machine-readable data format, a list of fire events with valid list of fire-management resources;
• means for providing as input, in a machine-readable data format, a list of fire-management resources by one or more of kind, category and type;
• means for providing as input, in a machine-readable data format, a list of fire-management resources by station location;
• means for providing as input, in a machine-readable data format, a list of fire-management resources (such as water-tenders and air-tankers) by their resource dependencies;
• means for providing as input, in a machine-readable data format, a list of fire-management resources with cumulative line production quantity by time period for each fire;
• means for providing as input, in a machine-readable data format, a list of stations with station capacities and expansion penalties;
• means for employing data processing in a computer to analyze strategic utility/benefit (weighted acres managed) under different planning scenarios involving one or more of user-selection of stations, their capacities, and resources there-in;
• and
• means for employing data processing in a computer to generate, in a machine-readable data format, a utility/benefit optimization model of overall strategic utility/benefit under one or more different planning scenarios;
• means for employing data processing in a computer to solve a stochastic integer program of a utility/benefit optimization model by solving its deterministic equivalent using a two-phase optimization approach;
• means for producing as output, in a machine-readable data format, a list of fires with their ID, corresponding contained/escaped status, containment time period, deployed resources, and expected utility;
• means for producing as output, in a machine-readable data format, a list of deployed resources by one or more of kind, category, type and station location;
• means for producing as output, in a machine-readable data format, a distribution of the optimal utility function values, weighted acres managed (WAM), by each scenario.

A computer-implemented method for predicting or optimizing the budget needed for allocation of disaster management resources to a plurality of disaster events, comprising the steps of:

• providing input to a computer, in a machine-readable data format, information
• (I) describing attributes of a plurality of available disaster management resources,
• (II) describing a plurality of disaster scenarios;
• and
• performing a two-phase stochastic optimization on said input
• wherein a first phase of said two-phase optimization produces a deployment solution which identifies resource preferences for particular disasters of said plurality of disasters, and
• wherein a second phase of said two-phase optimization identifies which resource of said one or more available disaster resources is assigned to a particular disaster scenario based on the resource preferences identified in the first phase.