Aerial firefighting only works when it's synchronised with ground crews and water resources. This study builds a bi-objective optimisation model that schedules aircraft, ground vehicles and reservoirs across many fire sites at once - minimising both total completion time and resource shortage - and a fast coordination heuristic to solve it at real scale. It's tested on Victoria's 2009 Black Saturday (Kilmore East–Kinglake) fires.
The 2009 Kinglake fire (red core, yellow spread), the airfields used as aircraft bases, reservoirs and CFA stations across the study region.
An original schematic. Aircraft (navy) cycle base → reservoir → fire, dropping water; ground crews (green) move in behind them. Scrub the mission clock, or switch coordination off to see suppression slow down.
A greedy coordination heuristic is benchmarked against a genetic algorithm and an exact method across small-to-large instances.
The coordination heuristic returns better schedules than the genetic algorithm, and the gap widens as the problem grows - while the exact solver can't reach large instances at all.
Where the exact method stalls beyond ~90 activities, the heuristic schedules 320 activities in about five minutes - fast enough to support an incident controller under pressure.
Built around the Black Saturday context to stress-test the plan.
With full resources, every operation is completed - the mission at the worst site finishes in 46 time steps with no shortage in the final step.
When the largest aircraft is unavailable, the model reshuffles other resources across time steps; unmet-demand cost rises only slightly (~2%) and completion time holds.
Under a tighter window the model finishes ~11% faster by using resources from other steps - at the cost of ~16% higher unmet demand.
The plan lets fire agencies coordinate aerial and ground assets, prioritise the most severe sites, and act as an early-warning tool as a fire spreads.
A research showcase on coordinating multi-agency aircraft for bushfire suppression.
Optimisation assigns aircraft to fires over time under range, refill and priority constraints.
Explore the scenarios to see how coordination beats capacity.
