One of the more interesting applications involves forest fire spread simulations.

In his article,
David Cabellero gives an in-depth explanation of how Taxicab Geometry is used in this field.
However, certain modifications have been made to the geometry in hopes of making the
simulation of forest fires better.

In essence, fire managers used computer applications to calculate the time it takes fire to travel
from one cell on a grid to the eight surrounding cells by dividing the distance that the fire
spreads by the speed in that direction. Each of the eight cells is identified by a certain number,
given in the following figure:

(p.3)

This extended form of Taxicab Geometry not only considers the taxicab distance from cell A to
each of the surrounding cells, but it has a modification that incorporates two extra paths that
extend from one corner to another in a diagonal:

(p. 5)

In this way, instead of just having horizontal and vertical segments for the distance, segments
from lines that exist at 45 degree angles can also be used. While the various segments that
comprise a distance from one point to the next are usually confined to a rectangle, distances in
this form of Taxicab Geometry exist inside a parallelogram. The first figure below shows
distances in regular Taxicab Geometry while the second shows distances in the extended
version:

(p.6)

Therefore, the distance between two points in this extended Taxicab Geometry is defined by the
sum of the number of horizontal or vertical segments and the diagonal segments multiplied by
. We obtain the following equation:

e


where U is the number of straight segments and D is the number of diagonal segments.

Since the diagonal segments occupy spaces that could also consist of a horizontal and a
vertical segment, we can obtain the values of U and D by the following:

|

| |

|n|

| |

|
n|

| |

| (p.6)

ore nformton on the fre smulton process cn be found n Cblleros rtcle:
http://taxicabgeometry.net/docs/mirror/20061127_Caballero_Taxicab.pdf