Wildfire Emergency Support System

Wildfire Emergency Support System

The system was developed to provide the administration—in this case, a mountain community—with a tool designed to improve efficiency during wildfire response and firefighting operations.
To achieve this, all roads and tracks providing access to the affected forest areas were carefully surveyed. In a second phase, they were classified according to their characteristics, making it possible to identify the most suitable wildfire response vehicle (AIB) available for each route.
The Geographic Information System provides the essential functionalities required to support wildfire emergency management. A dedicated routing function, implemented using the Dijkstra algorithm, takes into account access restrictions related to vehicle dimensions and road accessibility, making it possible to identify the fastest route to the fire location reported by the Central Operations Room of the Provincial Coordination Centre.
The system also supports analyses that take into account:

• Forest road network, including the related accessibility constraints, such as carriageway width and road surface conditions;
• Logistics of operational centres and nodes across the territory, including the characteristics of the vehicles available;
• Fire risk level, based both on vegetation type and on the possible presence of high-priority points of interest.

Web-based editing tools facilitate the continuous updating of the map layers that make up the wildfire cadastre.
The web technology used to develop the interfaces is compatible with the main web browsers in use at the time, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Latest Release:
The latest release includes a vehicle tracking feature. A dynamic layer displaying the real-time position of each field vehicle can be activated in the Web GIS interface and used as an overlay with the other information layers.