A Holistic Approach to Wildfire Suppression Aircraft Fleet Design Using Operational Considerations and Evaluation Metrics

Kurzfassung

Wildfires are increasing in frequency, intensity, and duration, driving suppression and damage costs and motivating more coordinated use of aerial firefighting assets. Within this context, the COLOSSUS Projects X-Challenge provides a System-of-Systems (SoS) simulation toolkit for evaluating integrated wildfire response concepts under shared resource constraints. Building on this framework, we introduce an aircraft sizing and SoS-level fleet assessment methodology that links conceptual platform design with fleet tactic selection and extends the COLOSSUS toolkit. Two platforms are sized under 2035 technology assumptions: a 2,000 kg-payload eVTOL and a 3,000 kg-payload Single Engine Air Tanker, using physics-based performance and parametric cost models. A Design of Experiments (DoE) workflow with Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS), coupled with the SoS toolkit, evaluates mixed fleets and tactic assignments in three representative regions. Effectiveness is quantified via a weighted, normalized Measure of Effectiveness (MoE) that aggregates burnt area, emissions, and cost metrics into a single scalar. Results indicate that fleet acquisition costs dominates the MoE and that location-specific fleet compositions can outperform a single fixed fleet without degrading suppression outcomes. Future work will extend this framework to adaptive, location-specific fleet design and broader sensitivity analyses of MoE weights and scenarios.