Fighting Wildfires under Uncertainty: A Sequential Resource Allocation Approach

Standard disaster response involves using drones (or helicopters) for reconnaissance and using people on the ground to mitigate the damage. In this paper, we look at the problem of wildfires and propose an efficient resource allocation strategy to cope with both dynamically changing environment and uncertainty. We propose Firefly, a new resource allocation algorithm, that can provably achieve optimal or near-optimal solutions with high probability by first efficiently allocating observation drones to collect information to reduce uncertainty, and then allocate the firefighting units to extinguish the fire. For the former, Firefly uses a combination of maximum set coverage formulation and a novel utility estimation technique, and it uses a knapsack formulation to calculate the allocation for the latter. We also demonstrate empirically by using a real-world dataset that Firefly achieves up to 80 90% performance of the offline optimal solution, even with a small number of drones, in most cases.