Abstract: Faced with a large number of firefighting aircraft, safe and scientific allocation of firefighting tasks has become the key to improve the efficiency of firefighting. In this paper, we present a mixed-integer programming model for the firefighting aircraft scheduling problem in large-scale wildfires and develop a branch-and-cut algorithm to solve it. The model has been developed to address the diverse firefighting requirements of different regions at different times. And it ensure that the sum of the target water deficits in each region is minimized to slow down the spread of the fire. In this paper, we combine the flight characteristics and mission constraints of a variety of firefighting aircraft and accelerate the solution process by introducing effective inequalities, and validate the performance of the algorithms on experimental data of different sizes. The results show that the model can be used in complex air resource allocation problems to maximize firefighting efficiency while ensuring safety.

Key words: aerial firefighting, task scheduling, emergency rescue, mixed-integer programming, valid inequality