DEVS-FIRE: design and application of formal discrete event wildfire spread and suppression models

Abstract

DEVS-FIRE is a discrete event system specification (DEVS) model for simulating wildfire spread and suppression. It employs a cellular space model to simulate fire spread and agent models that interact with the cellular space to simulate fire suppression with realistic tactics. The complex interplay among forest cells and agents calls for formal treatment of the fire spread and fire suppression models to verify the correctness of DEVS-FIRE. This paper gives formal design specifications of fire spread and suppression agent models used in DEVS-FIRE and applies DEVS-FIRE to both artificially generated and real topography, fuels and weather data for a study area located in the US state of Texas. The paper also develops a new method, called pre_Schedule, for scheduling ignition events of forest cells more efficiently than the original onTime_Schedule event scheduling method used in DEVS-FIRE. Simulation results show the performance improvement of the new method, and demonstrate the utility of DEVS-FIRE as a viable discrete event model for wildfire simulations.