Comparison of Current and Next-Generation Aerial Firefighting Vehicles in an Agent-Based System of Systems Simulation Framework

Abstract

In this thesis, potential next-generation and conventional aerial firefighting aircraft are compared with regards to their effectiveness. An agent-based simulation framework is utilized to imitate real-world wildfire incidents to which the different aircraft designs are applied. Initially, the framework only handled electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles. Code adaptions were made for conventional fixed-wing vehicles. Additionally, a performance modeling process was conducted for conventional aircraft to adopt the energy consumption model of the framework with approximated values. The Harz Wildfire and Karst Wildfire arethe investigated incidents. The results show that small-payload next generation designs have the highest suppression effectiveness. However, a high availability of vehicles needs to be guaranteed to accomplish this effectiveness and to outperform conventional vehicles.