Abstract

Programs that can predict wildfire behavior are a very useful tool in terms of extinguishing these fires more effectively. State of the art wildfire simulators present some drawbacks such as not being sufficiently user-friendly, being expensive, requiring great computational power or having poor graphical representation. This paper presents a prototype wildfire simulation app that uses Fast Marching (FM) as its core algorithm. The wildfire app is developed as a Matlab GUI. Said application shows the shape of the fire front at a given moment in time in a 3D map of the terrain affected by the fire. Any real life maps can be loaded to the application for wildfire prediction. The user can choose to vary parameters such as starting (ignition) and ending points, wind direction and speed and propagation time, and see its effect on fire propagation. Interface response to each change in the input is very fast, therefore proving the effciency of the algorithm. Although a prototype, the wildfire basic app is superior to some state of the art simulators regarding certain important features. It can be concluded that Fast Marching is a valid core algorithm for a fire simulator. The way the app is programmed in Matlab confers it flexibility, enabling further specific changes that make it truly competitive against currently used wildfire simulators.