A Variational Calculus Approach to Wildfire Monitoring Using a Low-Discrepancy Sequence-Based Deployment of Sensors

This paper deals with the estimation of the wildfire ignition location by using a variational approach, which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been proposed before. Wildfires are here modeled by using two balance equations for energy and fuel, where the fuel loss due to combustion is defined by the fuel reaction rate. The physical coefficients of the model, together with the initial fuel distribution, are here supposed to be known. The use of a small number of low cost temperature sensors constituting a sensor network distributed on the field according to a low-discrepancy sequence is investigated which provides some promising results for this estimation problem considered to be very difficult in the litterature.