My doctoral studies are part of the European project "Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE)", between Europe and Australia named "Geospatial based Environment for Optimisation Systems Adressing Fire Emergencies", GEO-SAFE, aiming at proposing innovative methods to deal effectively with problems related to wildfires. A main objective is to study probabilistic, stochastic and robust combinatorial optimization methods to assist in the prevention and mitigation phases of forest fire management by proposing to improve infrastructures to make them less vulnerable to the various future events considered.

Abstract: The location of shelters in different areas threatened by wildfires is one of the possible ways to reduce fatalities in a context of an increasing number of catastrophic and severe forest fires. The problem is basically to locate p shelters minimizing the maximum distance people will have to cover to reach the closest accessible shelter in case of fire. The landscape is divided in zones and is modeled as an edge-weighted graph with vertices corresponding to zones and edges corresponding to direct connections between two adjacent zones. Each scenario corresponds to a fire outbreak on a single zone (i.e., on a vertex) with the main consequence of modifying evacuation paths in two ways. First, an evacuation path cannot pass through the vertex on fire. Second, the fact that someone close to the fire may have limited choice, or may not take rational decisions, when selecting a direction to escape is modeled using a new kind of evacuation strategy. This evacuation strategy, called Under Pressure, induces particular evacuation distances which render our model specific. We propose two problems with this model: the Robust p-Center Under Pressure problem and the Probabilistic p-Center Under Pressure problem. First we prove hardness results for both problems on relevant classes of graphs for our context. In addition, we propose polynomial exact algorithms on simple classes of graphs and we develop mathematical algorithms based on integer linear programming.

Keywords: Forest fire emergency, Shelter location under uncertainty, Probabilistic ,Variants of the p-Center problem, Probabilistic and Robust Combinatorial Optimization, Integer linear programming

My supervisors are Marc Demange and Cecile Murat.

I completed a computer science and engineering diploma at Université de Technologie de Compiègne and a Master of Research's program 'Modeling, Optimization, Decision, Organization' at Université Paris-Dauphine.