Optimal Placement of Acoustic Firefighting Antennas: A Maximum Coverage Pso

Firefighting traditionally relies on water and extinguishing agents (foam, powder, gas). Recently, studies have shown that low-frequency sound waves (30 - 60 Hz) can disrupt oxygen supply and contribute to extinction. In this context, we study the optimal placement of acoustic firefighting antennas in order to maximize the coverage of high-risk areas while limiting the number of deployed antennas. We model the problem as a variant of the maximum covering problem over a zone with incidence matrix built from a wildfire history in Algeria (2001 - 2019). We then propose a hybrid approach, Maximum Coverage Particle Swarm Optimization (MCPSO), inspired by two other Particle Swarm Optimization variations, combining a merge step toward attractors with a local search based on add/remove gains. Experiments on real data show that the approach reaches up to 95.5% coverage on Algerian high-risk fire zones.