An open-source software system for setting wildfire evacuation triggers

Abstract

Wildfire evacuation triggers are prominent geographic features used in wildfire evacuation practices to facilitate warning and communication during evacuations. When a fire crosses these features, emergency managers issue evacuation orders for the residents in the path of the fire. Computerized modeling of triggers uses geographic information systems (GIS) and fire-spread modeling to calculate a geographic buffer for a given locality with an input evacuation time. The existing trigger modeling method uses several software packages and programs to create trigger buffers, which makes it inconvenient and time-consuming to use in practice. In this work, an open-source software system is designed and implemented for setting wildfire evacuation triggers. The analysis, design, and implementation of the software system are presented. Moreover, a case study that employs the proposed system to create trigger buffers in Julian, California illustrates the software system. The results show that the proposed system is more user-friendly and makes it more convenient to perform trigger modeling in various applications. The open-source nature of the software system could potentially facilitate communication and collaboration between the developers, researchers, and emergency managers.