Framework for an integrated simulation system for Wildland-Urban Interface fire evacuation

The negative consequences of fires in case of evacuation in wildland-urban interfaces (WUI) are a global issue that affect many communities around the world. To date, there is a lack of a comprehensive tool able to aid decision making in case of WUI fire evacuation. To address this issue, this paper presents a design specification for a simulation system for the quantification of evacuation performance in case of Wildland-Urban Interface fire incidents. This includes three main modelling components, namely 1) fire spread, 2) pedestrian movement and 3) traffic. To date, the development and use of modelling tools for disaster assessment have mostly been performed in isolation (i.e., with limited coupling between fire models, pedestrian models and traffic models). This paper presents the results of the review of these three core modelling components and the requirements for their integration into an integrated toolkit. A systematic approach for the review has been developed and applied with the goal of identifying the key features needed for the integration. This framework aims at assessing evacuation performance for both evacuation planning as well as decision support applications. Such a framework might be used to predict how the evacuation develops based on different fire conditions and according to different evacuation decisions. This paper presents some of the key findings of the modelling framework specification, namely: 1) the level of granularity of each type of model in relation to the scenario (i.e. spatial and temporal scale) and their applications (for all layers under consideration) and 2) the required data exchange among different models.