Decision support for the selection of optimal tower site locations for early‐warning wildfire detection systems in South Africa

Abstract

Effective early detection of forest fires can be achieved by specialised systems of tower‐mounted cameras. Foresters and locals with intimate knowledge of the terrain traditionally plan the tower site locations – without the aid of computational optimisation tools. However, such knowledge and expertise may not be available to system planners when entering vast new territories. The process of selecting multiple tower sites from a large number of potential site locations with the aim of maximising system visibility of smoke above a prescribed region is a complex combinatorial optimisation problem. We present two recent applications of novel site‐selection frameworks for tower‐mounted camera‐based wildfire detection systems (CWDS), which have been under development with guidance from experts from the South African developed ForestWatch wildfire detection system. A novel single‐site search framework determined alternatives for 13 proposed sites in South Africa's Mpumalanga province, of which 6 alternatives were chosen over the initially proposed sites. The system site selection framework was showcased in determining a four‐camera CWDS layout in South Africa's Southern Cape – significantly improving on the detection capability of the layout initially proposed by technical experts.

Optimisation of rural roads planning based on multi-modal travel: a multi-service accessibility study in Nepal’s remote Karnali Province

“…3 An illustration of the notion of Pareto optimality and the translation of candidate roads plans to objective function space. Numerous candidate solutions are evaluated with respect to the objective functions, and those that are determined to be Pareto optimal (non-dominated) are sought for decision making purposes (Heyns et al 2020) investigating additional solutions determined between these points by ILP and heuristics approaches (Heyns et al 2021). An illustration of such corner points is provided in Fig.…”

“…A modified version of the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) (Deb et al 2002) was developed for this paper, building on previous research and applications in which it has been used to evaluate the placement of radar and defence systems (Heyns and van Vuuren 2018), and cameras used for wildfire-detection (Heyns et al 2021) and surveillance (Heyns and Van Vuuren 2015;Heyns 2021).…”

Optimal selection of COVID-19 vaccination sites in the Philippines at the municipal level

“…Our proposed approach solves a facility location program, which is a problem that minimizes the cost of satisfying a set of demands with respect to some set of constraints ( Facility Location, 2009 ). Facility location problem has a variety of applications including determining optimal locations of solar power plant sites ( Wang et al, 2020 ), hydrogen production sites ( Yee et al, 2020 ), tsunami sensors ( Ferrolino, Lope & Mendoza, 2020 ; Ferrolino et al, 2020 ), infrastructure maintenance depot ( Kim & Kim, 2021 ), tower sites for early-warning wildfire detection systems ( Heyns et al, 2020 ), and high-speed train stations ( Chanta & Sangsawang, 2020 ), among others. Facility location has also been used in several COVID-19-related studies.…”

Optimal Selection of COVID-19 Vaccination Sites at the Municipal Level

“…The coronavirus disease (COVID- 19), which was first reported in Wuhan, China, has spread across the globe and was declared a pandemic by the WHO on March 11, 2020 [1,2]. It has been shown that the COVID-19 vaccines are effective against severe disease and initial findings suggest that they can protect the population against infection [3][4][5].…”

“…Our proposed approach solves a facility location program, which is a problem that minimizes the cost of satisfying a set of demands with respect to some set of constraints [13]. Facility location problem has a variety of applications in determining optimal locations of solar power plant sites [14], hydrogen production sites [15], tsunami sensors [16,17], infrastructure maintenance depot [18], tower sites for early-warning wildfire detection systems [19], and high-speed train stations [20], among others. Facility location has also been used in several COVID-19-related studies.…”