Discrete Event Front-tracking Simulation of a Physical Fire-spread Model

Abstract

Simulation of moving interfaces, like a fire front usually requires the resolution of a large scale and detailed domain. Such computing involves the use of supercomputers to process the large amount of data and calculations. This limitation is mainly due to the fact that large scale of space and time is usually split into nodes, cells or matrices, and the solving methods often require small time steps. This paper presents a novel method that enables the simulation of large scale/high resolution systems by focusing on the interface. Unlike the conventional explicit and implicit integration schemes, it is based on the discrete-event approach, which describes time advance in terms of increments of physical quantities rather than discrete time stepping. Space as well is not split into discrete nodes or cells, but we use polygons with real coordinates. The system is described by the behaviour of its interface, and evolves by computing collision events of this interface in the simulation. As this simulation technique is suited for a class of models that can explicitly provide rate of spread for a given configuration, we developed a specific radiation based propagation model of physical wildland fire. Simulations of a real large scale fire performed with an implementation of our method provide very interesting results in less than 30 seconds with a 3 metres resolution with current personal computers.

Simulation of a Large Wildfire in a Coupled Fire-Atmosphere Model

“…The specificities of this interface capturing method compared to [6,13] are the discrete event temporal scheme (based on a scheduler rather than on regular time steps) and markers' motion, which are not tied to any underlying grid such as in [13,32] or the original Marker And Cell (MAC) method [33]. A complete description and test of the code may be found in [24,34].…”

Wildland Fire Behaviour Case Studies and Fuel Models for Landscape‐Scale Fire Modeling

“…Fire behavior fuel models were developed for some Mediterranean vegetation types in order to match the requirements of the modified model of surface fire. The fire model was included in the wildland fire calculation system Forefire [13]. Forefire allows conversion of the two-dimensional model (x-z) to three dimensions (x-y-z) and then simulating the propagation of the fire perimeter across a modeled landscape, taking into account spatial information.…”

“…This involves two distinct processes: first, representing the fire perimeter in a manner suitable for simulation, and second, propagating that perimeter in a manner suitable for the perimeter's representation. Both processes are carried out by Forefire [13]. The Forefire simulation code is based on a discrete event simulation (DEVS) [24] formalization of a front tracking method.…”

Physical parametrisation of fire-spotting for operational fire spread models: response analysis with a model based on the Level Set Method

“…The Australian wildfire simulator PHOENIX Rapidfire (Tolhurst et al, 2008) is designed to model large fast moving fires and also includes a fire-spotting module, but the formulations for fire spread in PHOENIX are calibrated for eucalyptus forests and 5 a generic application to other types of fuels requires a re-calibration (Pugnet et al, 2013). The new operational models like WRF-SFIRE (Mandel et al, 2011) and FOREFIRE (Filippi et al, 2009) are fast and allow coupling with the atmospheric models for a better representation of the initial and concurrent atmospheric conditions; but lack any specific module to tackle the fire-spotting behavior.…”