Aerial Wildfire Suppression Planning with a Hybrid CNN-Cellular Automata Fire Model
Aerial wildfire suppression requires decisions about when, where, and how to deploy limited aircraft. We present an intervention-design framework built on a frozen hybrid convolutional neural network and cellular automaton (CNN-CA) simulator trained jointly on six historical wildfires. First, we jointly optimize binary drop execution and continuous location and orientation, with aircraft-specific footprints, wind drift, and availability, turnaround, and grounded-day constraints. Second, we model water as an immediate transfer of burning probability to the unburned state and retardant as a persistent reduction in the fuel contribution to spread. Third, we remove drops by a rollout-verified backward elimination while limiting degradation in selected fire-performance metrics. Fourth, we evaluate fixed schedules under daily state sampling and a separate spatially correlated probability-field sensitivity test. Fifth, we compare the optimizer with random, tactical, greedy, and derivative-free planners under shared fleet, drop-budget, and simulator-evaluation allowances, and measure computational scaling. A 2020 Bear Fire case study considers two objectives: total fire-affected area and protected-region exposure. The two-stage total-area schedule reduces deterministic terminal extent by 89.5% relative to the simulator baseline with 1,111 drops. The nominal schedule is sensitive to small pose and effectiveness perturbations. The tactical heuristic is more economical at small evaluation allowances; the gradient planner achieves better objectives with more computation.