CSR-CSI: System Integration of Dynamical Data Driven Wildfire Spread and Firefighting Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization

Recent wildfires have highlighted the serious threat from wildfires to communities and ecosystems throughout the world. There is a need for new systems software tools to assist in effective fire management regarding where and when to deploy limited firefighting resources. This project develops an integrated data acquisition, modeling, simulation, and optimization software environment for effective wildfire management. This environment integrates real-time acquisition of weather and fire-front position data, fast simulation of fire spread to predict fire behavior, just in-time optimization to compute firefighting resource deployment, and modeling and simulation of firefighting to assess strategies of fire suppression. Integrating these components that are usually treated in isolation enables a novel comprehensive software system to effectively support real-time optimal decision-making for fire management and minimize firefighting risk and cost. Specific research objectives include developing system architecture and a software environment that integrates real time data acquisition, fire spread simulation, stochastic optimization, and firefighting simulation for dynamical data driven wildfire management, and developing runtime environment to support efficient computation and seamless communication among the different functional components in a distributed computing environment. The integrated systems software environment will provide a needed decision support tool to assist in firefighting decision making. The software environment will also serve as a valuable training and planning tool for fire management, and will provide a multidisciplinary educational tool for students and researchers at large.