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A Game-Theoretic Model for Resource Sharing for Wildfires

Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery

The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center (CIFFC) was created in 1982 with the primary mandate to facilitate the exchange of wildland fire fighting resources including personnel, equipment and aircraft between member agencies. Since its establishment, resource sharing across agencies has increased dramatically. However, there has been a growing recognition by the CIFFC Council of Directors and the Wildland Fire Management Working Group that the current levels of resource sharing will not be adequate for future activity. There have been several incidents in the recent past where there were insufficient resources to meet the national demand, and trends in changing climates, fire occurrence and the expansion of the wildland-urban interface coupled with government fiscal trends of cost containment and reduction all point to increased resource shortages. There is, thus, interest in investigating new solutions to the problem. Although in Canada we have been sharing resources between agencies for more than twenty-five years, to the best of our knowledge, little is known about the strategic process that goes into the borrow/lend decision. When does an agency request resources is, perhaps, an easy question, but the more difficult, and perhaps more interesting.

Mathematics; Probability theory and stochastic processes; Operations research, mathematical programming; Mathematics of planet earth

video/mp4

Author affiliation: University of Waterloo

2014-08-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/49718

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/