Operations Research Approaches for Forest Firefighting

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Erdi Daşdemir

Forest fires are natural disasters whose frequency and severity have been increasing due to climate change, rising temperatures, and long-term droughts, leading to substantial ecological, economic, and societal losses. Each year, millions of hectares of forest land are destroyed worldwide, underscoring the growing need for scientifically grounded planning and decision support tools to improve firefighting effectiveness and mitigate damage. This challenge also opens a wide range of research opportunities that can benefit from operations research methodologies. This seminar presents a recently published study by the speaker that develops a mixed-integer programming model for aerial firefighting, where routing and scheduling decisions are optimized to maximize value retention in wildfire-threatened regions. The problem is formulated in continuous time and simultaneously considersfire spread behavior and the movement and timing of aerial resources. To address scalability challenges, a solution approach based on dynamic constraint generation is developed. The seminar also discusses ongoing research directions, including a two-stage stochastic extension that explicitly accounts for uncertainty in fire spread and an assignment-based model that incorporates fire-specific suppression requirements at affected regions. Together, these studies provide illustrative examples of how operations research can contribute to modern forest firefighting operations.

Short Bio

Erdi Dasdemir is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Hacettepe University. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Middle East Technical University in 2021, where his dissertation focused on multi-objective UAV route planning. He has held visiting appointments at the University at Buffalo (two years) and the University of Southampton (three months). His research focuses on applied operations research, with an emphasis on mathematical modeling, multi-objective optimization, and translating OR models into decision support tools. He has both research and practical experience in real-world routing, scheduling, and network flow problems. Over the past two years, his work has increasingly focused on operations research for forest firefighting. His research is funded by AFOSR, TÜBİTAK, and YÖK. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in mathematical modeling and data analytics.

Venue

Friday, January 2, 2026, 4.00 pm

IE Building, Halim Doğrusöz Auditorium (IE 03)