Scheduling jobs to contain a natural disaster: a model and complexity

This paper is devoted to the problem of scheduling suppression units so that a natural disaster is dealt with as efficient as possible. The concept of deteriorating jobs is adopted, that is, the formal model of scheduling represents linearly increasing value loss as the disaster remains unsuppressed and increasing time for its suppression. More precisely, two different goals are considered: finding a suppression schedule of minimal length, and finding a suppression schedule minimizing the total completion time. The former goal is advantageous to the suppression brigade, while the latter realizes the interest of the environment. We show that these two objectives are often in conflict. Then we review the state of the art concerning efficient solutions to the problem.