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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Bilevel optimization approach for fuel treatment planning
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Tomás Lagos
  • Junyeong Choi
  • Brittany Segundo
  • Jianbang Gan
  • Lewis Ntaimo
  • Oleg A Prokopyev
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title European Journal of Operational Research
Publisher Elsevier
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 0377-2217
Volume 320
Number 1
Page Range 205 - 218
Date 2025
Abstract Text Various fuel treatment practices involve removing all or some of the vegetation (fuel) from a landscape to reduce the potential for fires and their severity. Fuel treatments form the first line of defense against large-scale wildfires. In this study, we formulate and solve a bilevel integer programming model, where the fuel treatment planner (modeled as the leader) determines appropriate locations and types of treatments to minimize expected losses from wildfires. The follower (i.e., the lower-level decision-maker) corresponds to nature, which is adversarial to the leader and designs a wildfire attack (i.e., locations and time periods, where and when, respectively, wildfires occur) to disrupt the leader’s objective function, e.g., the total expected area burnt. Both levels in the model involve integrality restrictions for decision variables; hence, we explore the model’s difficulty from the computational complexity perspective. Then, we design specialized solution methods for general and some special cases. We perform experiments with semi-synthetic and real-life instances to illustrate the performance of our approaches. We also explore numerically the fundamental differences in the structural properties of solutions arising from bilevel model and its single-level counterpart. These disparities encompass factors like the types of treatments applied and the choice of treated areas. Additionally, we conduct various types of sensitivity analysis on the performance of the obtained policies and illustrate the value of the bilevel solutions.
Free access at DOI
Digital Object Identifier 10.1016/j.ejor.2024.07.014
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