Fuelbreak placement is an important consideration in fire management. Historically, strategies for placing fuelbreaks have mostly fallen on the experience of fire managers such as following ridgelines or other landscape features. More recent efforts have searched for a formal placement strategy but have struggled to scale to large areas.

Samuel Dent, a research mathematician with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), presents a strategy utilizing equal graph partitioning and quantum computing to determine the placements with speed and efficacy.