Simulation of wildfire evacuation with dynamic factors and model composition

Abstract

Wildfires cause devastation on communities, most significantly loss of life. The safety of at-risk populations depends on accurate risk assessment and emergency planning. Evacuation modelling and simulation systems are essential tools for such planning and decision making. During a wildfire evacuation, the behaviour of people is a key factor; what people do, and when they do it, depends heavily on the spatiooral distribution of events in a scenario. In this paper, we introduce an approach that enables the behaviour of people and the timing of events to be explicitly modelled through what we term dynamic factors. Our approach composes several simulation and modelling systems, including a wildfire simulator, behaviour modeller, and microscopic traffic simulator, to compute detailed projections of how scenarios unfold. The level of detail provided by our modelling approach enables the definition of a new risk metric, the exposure count, which directly quantifies the threat to a population. Experiments for a wildfire-prone region in Victoria, Australia, resulted in statistically significant differences in clearance times and exposure counts when comparing our modelling approach to an approach that does not account for dynamic factors. The approach has been implemented in a high performance and scalable system - the architecture of which is discussed - that allows multiple concurrent scenarios to be simulated in timeframes suitable for both planning and response use cases.