Simulation of Aerial Supression Tasks in Wildfire Events Integrated with Gisfire Simulator

Abstract

Wildfire simulation tools focus on how fire spreads in the natural environment. Simulation of fire containment operations can provide managers with a tool that combine wildfire evolution with suppression operations. Combined simulation tools are useful to evaluate different strategies and tactics in firefighting wildfires. This paper presents the modelling and simulation of aerial containment operations integrated into a wildfire spread simulator. A continuous space wildfire spread simulator has been used for fire spread simulation. This simulator called GisFIRE integrates aerial operations and uses QGIS geographical information system to integrate both simulation tools with geographical information. The information system combines air facilities locations, usable bodies of water, and other relevant geo-information with the simulation procedures. Open source software is a requirement to allow integration of different software packages and usage of OGC standards to represent geographical information.