Forest Fire Modeling Using Cellular Automata and Dynamic Agents: A piHyFlow Approach

Forest fires are destructive events with significant social and economic consequences. Simulation may provide an invaluable tool for improving the effectiveness of fire suppression strategies. Cellular automata (CA) have been used for modeling fire behavior providing a discretization of space and enabling a local description of fire within each CA cell. In this paper we introduce the πHYFLOW formalism to model forest fires using CA. This formalism supports the process interaction worldview enabling the definition of dynamic processes/agents that can be created and destroyed at runtime. Simulation results demonstrate that the number of active fire agents is only a small fraction of the total number of CA cells, highlighting the efficiency of our method in representing large-scale forest fire scenarios.