Search

• A novel multi-objective scheduling model is developed for the emergency rescue planning problem. • The proposed model minimizes the fire extinguishing time, delay time, and number of fire rescue vehicles. • The factor of fire spreading speed is firstly considered in our optimization model. • A revised multi-objective discrete gravitational search slgorithm is designed to produce Pareto solutions. • An empirical case study in Heilongjiang Province, China, is applied. The implementation of emergency scheduling of priority-based rescue vehicles for extinguishing forest fires is a complex optimization problem facing with many challenges and difficulties to optimize the operational costs and to improve the efficiency to make robust decisions. The main challenges are to minimize the number of fire engines while minimizing firefighting time and firefighting delay time, simultaneously. The main difficulties to make these decisions are to consider the severity of each fire point with regards to the limited resources of vehicles. Hence, this paper motivates to develop a new multi-objective scheduling model for extinguishing the fire of forests considering rescue priority with the limited rescue resources. To make an efficient and robust solution for the proposed problem, another novelty is to propose a hybrid optimization algorithm which is a modified discrete gravitational search algorithm. To confirm the applicability of the proposed problem, an actual forest fire emergency scheduling in Heilongjiang Province, China, is simulated. The proposed hybrid optimization algorithm is tested to check the feasibility the Pareto solutions and it is compared with a set of well-known and recent algorithms to show its efficiency. Finally, after a comprehensive discussion, the results prove that this work provides an accurate and effective tool for performing the emergency scheduling for extinguishing the forest fire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firefly algorithm (FA) is an effective optimization technique based on swarm intelligence, which has been successfully applied to various practical engineering problems. In this paper, a new dynamic FA (called NDFA) is proposed for demand estimation of water resources in Nanchang city of China. First, a dynamic parameter strategy is used to avoid manually adjusting the step factor. Second, three estimation models in different forms (linear, exponential and hybrid) are developed in terms of the historical water use and local economic structure. Third, normalization method is utilized to eliminate the influences of different units of data. In the experiments, water use in Nanchang city from 2003 to 2015 is considered as a case study. The data from 2003 to 2012 are used for finding the optimal weights of the models, and the rest of data (2013–2015) are applied to test the models. Computational results show that all five FA variants can achieve promising solutions. The proposed NDFA obtains better performance than four other FA variants, and its prediction accuracy is up to 97.91%. Finally, the water demand in Nanchang city from 2017 to 2020 is predicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Denoeux proposed an operator called the cautious conjunctive rule (CCR) to combine non-dogmatic belief functions (i.e., the frame is considered a focal element) from reliable dependent sources, which can occur in practice. However, in cases such as uncertain multiple attribute and group decision analyses, belief functions may denote data that vary in importance. This paper extends CCR as a weighted CCR (WCCR) to combine belief functions in consideration of their relative weights in such situations. Properties of WCCR are analyzed, proven, and demonstrated using numerical examples. In particular, the consideration of relative weights enables WCCR to combine dogmatic belief functions. The normalized WCCR is further constructed and used to assess the trustworthiness of a hospital information system employed in many hospitals in Anhui Province, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]