Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266

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Applied Geography
journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/apgeog

A survey on systematic approaches in managing forest fires

Aditya Dhall a, 1, Akash Dhasade a, 1, Ashwin Nalwade a, 1, Mohan Raj V.K b, *, Vinay Kulkarni b
a
Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, 517506, India
b
TCS Innovation Labs, Tata Research Development & Design Centre, Hadapsar, Pune, 411013, India

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Natural disastrous events are part and parcel of our times and do occur when we least expect it to strike us.
Forest fires Disasters which take place in the vicinity of human livelihood due to natural causes, such as forest fires, tsunami,
Fire propagation models earthquakes, floods, storms etc., the consequence or toll on lives and structures is colossal. Such mishaps
Fire and victim localization
emphasize and prove the fact that nature is the true master and has gone beyond human resistivity or control
Disaster management strategies
mechanisms by miles. Each of such mishaps provide crucial lessons or experiences to learn from. Fortunately,
several disaster management approaches and technology advancements help with definitive affirmative
knowledge and analysis, mitigating impacts to human lives and structures.
This paper survey’s existing approaches in managing forest fires. We focus on specific aspects with forest fire
disaster, such as: fire localization, fire propagation modeling, victim localization, victim health evaluation, and
logistics involved with securing victims to safety. A comprehensive discussion on the state-of-the-art works in
managing forest fires is presented. Finally, this survey highlights open challenges and research trends in handling
forest fire disaster management systems.

1. Introduction (https://www.usatoday.com/, 2018). Australia is another geography,

Forest fire or wildfire is an uncontrollable fire fueled by different
types of wind, weather and vegetation cover, mostly occurring in wild
land areas, but which can also affect agricultural lands, houses and
entire communities. Unlike other natural disasters, wildfires are often
started by humans. Wildfires destroy everything in their path, people,
livestock, wild-life and structures alike, and burn land by the acres in a
matter of minutes.
There are about 100,000 wildfires in the United States each year
(https://www.nationalgeogr, 2018). The California forest fire of August
2013 burned a land area of 1042 square kilometers leading to a fire­
fighting cost of 127.35 million USD (Toulouse et al., 2015). According to
(Guha-Sapir et al., 2015), wildfire disasters in 2015 alone caused a
damage amounting to 3.1 billion USD. California’s Thomas fire in 2017
burned around 290,000 acres (https://www.thehindu.com/, 2462).
Recent 2018 California fires such as Mendocino Complex Fire, Carr Fire,
Ranch Fire are considered to be amongst the most destructive wildfire’s
in the state’s history having burnt in excess of 500,000 acres
(http://www.fire.ca.gov/cu, 2018). Since 2014, half of California’s 10
most destructive wildfires have burned in the past four years
which is susceptible to bush fires. Each year, we see increasing trend in
wildfire occurrences and the damages it causes to lives and property.
Similarly, in 2018, many parts of Europe specifically in Greece
(https://www.dw.com/en/gre, 2018) and Portugal, traditionally being
cooler places, but have been hit by unusually high summer temperatures
in recent times, and which possibly could have triggered these regional
forest fires.
Each of these wildfires, opens-up many unchartered territories that
nature poses on the society being impacted and the responders trying to
contain the impact. We still must learn more from each such instances
and this learning looks to be an ever catchup game. With each such new
wildfires, we end up in a “new-normal”.
Wildfire’s render people homeless, fertile lands are burned and
become barren, and millions of dollars are spent in the process of
repairing and providing immediate and after care relief caused by the
damages. People must be relocated, homes and life must be re-built,
large amount of smoke in the air makes the surrounding areas difficult
to inhabit due to alarming levels of toxicity, leading to widespread air
pollution and which needs to be tackled.
Considering the magnitude of losses, in terms of socio-demographic

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: v.raj@tcs.com (M.R. V.K).
1
This work was done during internship at TCS Innovation Lab, IITM Research Park, Chennai 6000113, Tamil Nadu, India.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2020.102266
Received 12 November 2018; Received in revised form 1 June 2020; Accepted 10 June 2020
Available online 7 July 2020
0143-6228/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
A. Dhall et al.
and socio-economic impacts due to wildfires, it is necessary to invest
considerable amount of time and effort in working towards early action
modalities to prevent such mishaps, or if they could not be prevented,
find out more efficient ways to save lives and mitigate the effects of the
disaster. In this paper, we survey works by researchers and agencies to
understand wildfire propagation, ways by which search, and rescue
approaches have been applied to prevent or mitigate fire and save
people.
1.1. Forest fire management-operational flow
Operational process workflow of a typical evacuate, quench fire,
search and rescue used in the forest fire scenario is depicted in Fig. 1.
Initially, fire alert triggers the system with initiating an early stage fire
localization process to track and capture real-time spatial and temporal
data about fire and propagation (fire and its contour). Further the in­
formation about fire and also the forecasted data using fire model,
proves to be crucial for devising fire and victim exploration approach.
Following the fire propagation trend, the system initiates people and
victim localization encompassing technique to estimate victim’s health
condition. Based on prioritized fire front data, firefighters and support
systems can be deployed to quench the fire. Also, simultaneously, based
on fire propagation or evolution trend, location of victims and their
health severity, appropriate resources such as medics and/or para­
medics ought to be dispatched to secure and save victims.
Fig. 1. Forest fire management - operational process flow.
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Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266
1.2. Forest fire management operational flow modules
Each of the enlisted forest fire search and secure operation module
have specific set of goals that ought to be met, quantitative set of
measures or outcome metrics to validate and achieving the goal, and set
of degrees of freedom or levers required to control the outcome so as to
meet the goal measures. Table 1lists the module specific goals, measures
and control levers to the forest fire search and secure operation flow .
The focus and scope of this state-of-the-art survey is as follows: a)
forest fire localization, b) forest fire and hazard modeling, c) victim
localization, d) victim’s health condition or severity estimation, and e)
firefighters or first responders or medical team allocation and deploy­
ment to quench fires, secure and save victims in times of duress.
2. Exploration
Primary function of exploration activity is to effectively and effi­
ciently explore the forest landscape or geography in a timely manner for
specific purpose such as to search and locate start-fires or fire front or
fire contour or people likely to be affected by the fire front with time.
Use of right agents and right exploration strategies in the exploration
process determines the success of the exploration process as a whole.
Please note: in this survey, we have considered “exploration” to be a
common activity used in both fire localization and victim localization
operation modules. We limit ourselves to detailing exploration majorly
done using swarm UAVs (intelligent agents or drones) based methods
alone.
A. Dhall et al. Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266

Table 1
Forest fire management system modules - goals, measures and levers.
Module Goal Measures Control Levers Actors

Fire modeling Estimate fire front propagation or
evolution over time,
Estimate Hazard to humans and
environment in and around the
vicinity of fire fronts
Fire localization Explore and Locate fire front,
Detect ignition points
Victim localization Explore and Locate people who are
likely to be affected or have already
been impacted by fire spread
Evacuate, Quench Evacuate people likely to be impacted
fire, Secure, and by fire,
Save Victims Quench fire and mitigate further fire
propagation
Rescue impacted victims
How accurate is the estimated fire front Fire model approaches and parameters Fire alarm/alert,
with respect to ground truth, considered in arriving at fire model, Fire model
Impact to People and infrastructure or contextual/environmental factors,
exposure level Fire alert co-ordinates
Fire front coverage area, Fire alert co-ordinates, Swarm robots (UAVs),
Number of distinct fire fronts Localization strategy, Fire front,
Available or useable resource and capacity Control and command
budget (UAVs) center (CCC)
Number of people impacted, Fire model evolution, UAVs,
Health condition/health severity level People concentration in the path of fire, Human settlements,
identified victims Localization strategy, environment,
Available or useable robot and Fire front,
communication resource budget CCC,
Victims
Number of people evacuated to safe Evacuation alert and strategy Fire fighters-
holding places Timely and save navigation path plan responder-support
% reduction in further growth of Fire Fire quenching strategy – prioritized team/resources,
front spread over time decision making, CCC,
Fire fighter or first responder casualty Fire model evolution, Deployment center
Navigation paths and Path reachability (DC),
options, Fire front,
Available or useable fire-fighter and Path plans
support resource budget
Number and % of victim’s rescued and Navigation paths and Path reachability Medics-paramedic-
moved to safe location options support team/
Number and % of victim’s who could not Victim rescue strategy – prioritized resources,
be rescued decision making, CCC,
Number and % of victim’s secured and Number of victims and their health DC,
moved to safety but could not be saved condition/severity, Fire front,
due to medical complications Dynamic handling of rescue mission with Victims,
change to in number of victims being Relief base,
continually located, Path plans
Available or usage medical/para-medic
and support resource budget,

2.1. Need for swarm unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
Current remote sensing approaches to forest fire monitoring and
detection can be grouped as: a) ground-based systems, b) manned aerial
vehicle-based systems, and c) satellite based systems, and d) UAV-based
systems.
We briefly touch upon the limitations with approaches that could be
used in the detection and monitoring systems. Ground based measure­
ment instruments may suffer from limited surveillance ranges and are
not suitable for very large areas such as forests.
Manned aerial vehicles are operated by human pilot(s) and are
typically large and expensive. Using a manned aerial vehicle, puts the
life of the pilot at harm’s way threatened by hazardous environment and
operator fatigue. Aircraft systems may sustain with higher payloads and
speed, but the hovering at a place and maintaining high and low speeds
are the challenges (Singhal, Bansod, & Mathew, 2018).
NASA’s MODIS (MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer)
and VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) satellites are
capable of detecting forest fires anywhere in world. But with resolution
of 375 m � 375 m which means that such fires (start fires) can be
detected if their extent is above half the pixel (i.e., about 7 ha) with some
impact to accuracy. Also, it is not reliable due to long scan period (less
revisit frequency) and low flexibility (Zhao, Ma, Li, & Zhang, 2018;
https://earthdata.nasa.go, 2019). Satellite systems with their temporal
and spatial scan resolution may be too low for detailed data capture for
forest fire fighting operations. Also, satellite systems cannot detect fires
or victims in the fire vicinity beneath/through thick cloud of smoke or
smog (Olsson et al., 2005).
Hence, UAVs with computer vision-based remote sensing systems are
an increasingly becoming a realistic option providing rapid, mobile, and
low-cost alternatives for forest fire monitoring, detection, and even
controlling fires (Chisholm et al., 2013). UAVs are emerging as a
promising solution for monitoring large areas to could capture
high-resolution imagery and broadcast frequent updates to control
center and fire crews at ground (Yuan et al., 2015). During firefighting
mission, UAVs could provide frequent and high-quality information on
fire behavior to fire fighters’ even under low light and high smoke
conditions by means of the embedded sensors with low cost (Aydin,
Selvi, Tao, & Starek, 2019).
Since, forest fires are highly sophisticated and non-structured, it is
crucial to use multiple sources of information from different locations
during forest fires. The rate at which this information is updated may be
unsatisfactory if only a single UAV is deployed, hence the need for UAV
swarms. With UAV swarms, it is possible to achieve: a) efficient forest
fire detection and monitoring, b) manage real-time information flow and
coverage, and c) achieve and fault tolerance by handling failures with
equipment or link autonomously.
A composite coordinated approach using the best out of Satellite
systems and UAVs would yield critical real-time information when
human lives is at stake.
2.2. UAV swarm based exploration
With unknown and uncertain environment at hand, swarm UAVs
prove to be better equipped than a single UAV or multiple decoupled
robots in handling failures. Inspired by biological or natural creatures,
many algorithms have been proposed to capture the behavior of indi­
vidual entity (UAVs in our case), which in turn, is part of group of similar
entities vested with a common holistic goal. Other than inspiration from
natural or biological organisms, artificial physics model also has
inspired methodologies which can tackle similar problem. Most com­
mon demerit in the majority of proposed techniques, is that they allow
repetitive coverage of a particular area which reflects in the increased
search cost associated with it. Sample swarm-based UAV exploration

3
A. Dhall et al.
technique categorization is captured in Fig. 2.
Samira Hayat et al. (Hayat et al., 2017) considered scenarios where
UAVs are responsible for first target detection, then keep tracking the
target and relaying information to base station (BS). The authors have
suggested three possible behavioral communication strategies used by
swarm of robots to achieve the goals (tracking fire front or victims)
optimized for time metrics. The communication strategies proposed are:
a) inform first strategy: as soon as target is detected, UAV flies back or
returns to BS to inform the BS, b) connect first strategy: ensures
communication path between target and BS, and c) simultaneous con­
nect and inform strategy-here both above strategies are followed
simultaneously.
Bin Yang et al. (Yang et al., 2015) presented a search algorithm based
on bacteria chemotaxis. The proposed algorithm performs the task to
search and trap the target in an unknown environment. Considering
robots as bacteria and associating a virtual nutrient value to the target
with robot to tend to move towards higher nutrient value. This algo­
rithm manages to avert the situation of local optimums by depleting the
nutrient value of covered area. Empirical results states Bacteria
Chemotaxis (BC) outperforms SACODM (Porta Garcia et al., 2009) and
RDPSO (Couceiro et al., 2012) in terms of time consumed. But algorithm
does allow the coverage of the already covered area which accounts for
unnecessary exploration and allows global communication between the
robots which is not a viable assumption in real-time scenarios.
Fossum, Montanier, & Haddow (2014, pp.1-8) proposed an algo­
rithm based on idea of pheromones, but with a variation of considering
them as repellent and not as attracting. It basically avoids the movement
of the robot in the direction of high value of pheromones. Repetitive
coverage of area is allowed as pheromones does evaporate and also
global information has to be shared with all robots.
Amirali Darvishzadeh and Bir Bhanu (Darvishzadeh & Bhanu, 2014)
proposed a variation of particle swarm optimization (PSO) where robot
is given a chance to deviate from computed PSO path. It shows an
increment in system performance by including constraints to typical
PSO algorithm and in this way addressing the limitations of PSO i.e.,
considering the covered area and missing the target by a small distance
due to lack of local search. The proposed approach does not solve the
limitations but uses heuristics to reduce them with respect to the entire
search operation.
Liping Xie et al. (Xie et al., 2013) proposed an algorithm based on
artificial physics optimization algorithm which governs the relative
movement of swarm robots based on the perceived virtual forces of
repulsion and attraction between the robots. The authors construct a
mapping between the attributes of stakeholders in a standard artificial
physics optimization algorithm and those in the case of swarm bots to
Fig. 2. Swarm based UAV exploration approaches.
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Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266
overcome certain differences between them. Virtual mass is associated
with each robot and has a global sense of environment and other robots.
Nakisa, Bahareh, et al. (Nakisa et al., 2015) proposed multi swarm
MSL-PSO algorithm which combines local search with the standard PSO
to overcome the problem when algorithm converges at a premature state
and ensures global convergence and stable equilibrium between explo­
ration and exploitation of search area. Simulation results suggest
MSL-PSO outperforms PSO and provides ability to each robot to search
the target in their local vicinity and overrule the strategy given by PSO if
they find one. To increase the exploration coverage, the algorithm di­
vides the robot into groups and introduces a variation in update of ve­
locity and position of robots by using the multiple best value of solution
and intensity rather than a global one.
Mohammad Naim Rastgoo et al. (Rastgoo et al., 2015) addressed the
limitations of PSO and modified it by allowing switching between local
search algorithm and modified PSO, ML-PSO. It uses A* as a local search
algorithm and adopts weightage to the extent of unvisited area in the
search space.
Shabnam Sadeghi Esfahlani (Sadeghi Esfahlani, 2019) proposed a
simulation method with an UAV fitted with camera and a fire detection
algorithm simultaneously to successfully detect fire and flame, UAVs
autonomously fly towards and hover around fire front, communicate to
the ground station using Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
(SLAM) system to generate a map of the environment. This approach
produces a slight error with the generated map owing to the real and
virtual UAV calibration due to the ground truth data and the correlation
complexity of tracking real and virtual camera coordinate frames.
2.3. Challenges and future opportunities
Satellite imagery is a common method for wildfire detection (Chis­
holm et al., 2013), but the long scan period and low flexibility make it
difficult for early fire detection. Satellite-based exploration show ad­
vantages in huge space of real fire, by which some vital areas and ear­
ly/start fire areas can be identified. And a swarm UAV approach can be
further introduced for detail and accurate level exploration (Zhao et al.,
2018) – A composite coordinated approach using the best out of Satellite
systems and UAVs would definitely yield critical real-time information
when human lives is at stake.
Geostationary Earth Observation (EO) satellites have high temporal
resolution but low spatial resolution, whereas Polar-orbiting systems
have high spatial resolution but low temporal resolution. Therefore, the
existing forest fire detection algorithms used in these two systems
merely focus on temporal or spatial information independently (Xie,
Song, Rui, Li, & Xia, 2018). Though, geostationary and polar-orbiting
A. Dhall et al.
satellites entails huge capital investment and operational cost compo­
nent factor but combining the advantages of spatial-based and
temporal-based algorithms would make fire detection more accurate
and robust, making this option viable in near future.
With satellites (such as MODIS and VIIRS), there are challenges or
viability issues to improve spatial resolution by developing better image
enhancing techniques and sub-pixel processing techniques.
Exploration techniques discussed this far, performs well in the
controlled environment but, for practical implementation where search
space is vast and with fire front yet to be contained scenario, further,
work has to be done. As on the practical note, we are usually bound with
availability and capabilities of the resources (UAVs in our case) which
should also be accounted in the proposed techniques. In here, we are
concerned with search of the target area, which requires full coverage of
the search space with Time as optimization metric. In disaster scenarios,
Time is an important metric that needs to be considered during search or
exploration and the outcome of it could help quickly quench fire or
safely secure victims as soon as possible.
We believe that drone/UAV technology can help and augment fire-
fighters, first responders and medics quench fire and rescue operations
in recent times. There is a critical need to have law enforcement policies
to regulate usage of drones/UAVs at times of disaster relief.
Selective leverage of specialized civilian drones and technologies
augmenting disaster management drones, purposeful and seamless
matching technology in swarm UAV images for better exploration of fire
fronts, inter co-ordination mechanisms at these times, and, not hinder­
ing fire-fighting operations is the need of the hour.
3. Fire localization
During calamities such as forest fires, it becomes important to
determine the areas where the intensity or magnitude of the calamity is
the highest. Factors like a) determination of places where intensity of
fire is the most, b) the direction of spread of fire, c) transient or ever-
changing nature of fire propagation etc., are critical to localize fire
contours or fire fronts. This section discusses the advancements in fire
localization techniques which is multi-disciplinary and spans across
disciplines such as Computer Science, Electronics and Telecommunica­
tion, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering and Economics.
Researchers have worked upon various approaches for fire detection
such as conventional fire alerting systems and visual sensors-based
systems. The systems belonging to the former category are based on
optical sensors, for which proximity to the fire (i.e., proximity to heat,
fire, radiation or smoke for activation) is a prerequisite for successful
functioning, and also fail to provide vital information about the char­
acteristics of fire, such as: size of the fire and the degree of burning (Ko
et al., 2011). Moreover, these systems also require a human agent in
confirming the fire by physically visiting the fire location. On the other
hand, visual systems avoid the need for visiting the location of the
disaster (Dimitropoulos et al., 2015). Clearly, visual based systems are
the way to proceed with. But there are some problems with visual based
systems as-well, such as irregularity of lighting, low transmission of
signals, and low quality and contrast of the captured images. Convolu­
tional Neural Networks (CNN) is one of the techniques used by visual
based systems.
Khan Muhammad et al. (Khan et al., 2018a) arrived at a computa­
tionally efficient CNN architecture based upon the SqueezeNet archi­
tecture (Iandola et al., 2016). The author points to the fact that CNN’s
have yielded the highest performance results when it comes to image
classification and computer vision related tasks. Hence, CNN’s use in fire
detection systems can significantly improve detection accuracy, which
will further help in minimizing the damage caused by fire breakouts.
However, since CNN have huge memory and computational based re­
quirements (Li et al., 2019), there is some skepticism regarding CNN’s
use in practical real-time surveillance systems. This work explores deep
learning-based procedures for early fire detection in closed-circuit
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Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266
television (CCTV) environments (both indoor and outdoor). The au­
thors used an intelligent feature map selection algorithm for choosing
the correct feature maps (i.e., the fire sensitive regions) from the trained
CNN.
Khan Muhammad et al. (Khan et al., 2018b) proposed a CNN and
IoMT (Internet of Multimedia Things) based approach. This work uses
AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al., 2012) as a baseline architecture and
fine-tuned it with respect to accuracy and complexity accordingly. This
work uses an adaptive prioritization mechanism that can adaptively
switch the status of the camera nodes based upon the importance. High
resolution cameras are used for capturing the important images when
the fire is detected. While the primary aim is to reduce the case of false
positives, the execution time must be kept in mind too, as time is of
essence. The data obtained from the high priority nodes assigned ac­
cording to the adaptive prioritization mechanism is transmitted using a
channel selected using the reliable channel selection algorithm. While
the proposed system improved the accuracy of fire detection with
optimal number of false alarms, the model size is high and kind of a
drawback. All the experiments were performed using a dataset of 68457
images which were collected from different fire-based datasets con­
taining images and videos, the major contributor being the Foggia’s
video dataset (Foggia et al., 2015). The datasets consist of videos with
both indoor and outdoor environments. While selecting the datasets, the
authors have laid emphasis on the challenges which could arise while
making classification. For instance, mountains containing fog, smoke or
cloud could be wrongly classified by motion-based techniques. Color
based techniques could fail in the case of red/orange colored fire like
objects. Hence, these elements were important in order for correctness.
Steven Verstockt et al. (Verstockt et al., 2009, 2011) clearly show
that vision-based techniques are a viable solution than the traditional
ones. Vision based fire and smoke detection algorithms that have been
proposed in the literature have led to a large amount of Video Fire
Detection (VFD) techniques, which can be used to detect the presence of
fire and smoke at an early stage. Majority of the current algorithms used
are based upon the analysis of motion, colour, energy, and disorder in­
formation in the video. Colour based algorithms are the most widely
used and majority of the colour based approaches in VFD make use of
the RGB colour space (Çelik & Demirel, 2009), along with HSI/HSV
saturation. Other frequently used fire features are flickering and energy
variation with focus on the temporal behavior of flames and smoke.
Since a fire flame is composed of several different colours within a small
area, spatial difference analysis makes use of this differences and gen­
erates analysis of the spatial colour variations in the pixel values to
distinguish true flames form false positives (fire like objects which can
be deceiving). Another feature used in fire detection is the variance in
flame and smoke regions with respect to time. The metrics used for these
are boundary roughness, turbulence variance and the randomness of
area of the flame. Motion is also used in many VFD systems in order to
simplify the detection process. To detect motion, the moving part in the
video frame is detected with the help of a motion segmentation algo­
rithm. The authors have proposed a framework which firstly detects the
fire/smoke/flames using low cost flame and smoke detectors. Then, the
single view detection results of the available cameras are projected by
homography onto vertical and horizontal flames which slice the plane.
Since each point is captured via multiple cameras, it helps in improving
the accuracy of size and position determination of the flames and smoke,
and also helps in minimizing occlusions. Then multiple view plane
slicing algorithm averages the multi-view detection results for the ver­
tical and horizontal views. Further, a 3D grid of virtual multi-camera
sensors viz., FireCube, is created with the help of the view planes.
Only points with stable detections at a given point of the 3D grid are
considered as a potential candidate for smoke or fire. The grid, after the
aforementioned filtering, can then be used to extract the location of
smoke and fire, the direction of propagation of fire and also information
about the nature of growth.
There are several sensor types that can be used to monitor
A. Dhall et al. Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266

environment parameters (Koo et al., 2010), such as temperature, CO2 Table 2

and smoke concentration sensor and so on. The intensity of fire is low in Summarized Fire localization approaches.
the beginning, and the development of the ignited fire source goes Methodology Literature CCTV Sensor used
through three stages of development: a) early smoldering, b) flame and surveillance (Type)
heat, and final decay and extinguishing stage with material depletion. CNN (Khan et al., 2018a, Yes
Quanbo Ge et al. (Ge et al., 2014) studied the fire localization 2018b)
problem based on temperature data taken by temperature sensor arrays. Fuzzy automata Ko et al. (2011) Yes
This work uses a novel technique called the range-range-range model, in Flame modelling Dimitropoulos Yes Yes (Sound)
et al. (2015)
which the statistical mean and variance of three local angle estimates are Range-Range-Range Ge et al. (2014) Yes (GPS)
recursively computed and the result is expressed by a circle with a center model
and a radius. The authors recognized that all the approaches till now Signal processing Wang et al. (2005) Yes
lacked in the following: a) there is limited help for guiding firefighting (Temperature)
3D model simulation Verstockt et al. Yes (Flame and
when fire positions are received in terms of discrete fire point estimates,
(2011) smoke)
b) output results are merely lots of coordinates of discrete point esti­ Chromaticity based Verstockt et al. Yes
mates in time series, and c) though, researcher’s committed themselves smoke detection (2009)
to improve the accuracy of fire point estimation, there were always such Clustering based Duan et al. (2011) Yes
dispersedly estimated points which are far from real fire (Duan et al., localization (Temperature)
2D model simulation Koo et al. (2010) Yes
2011). Thus, to sum it up, it is necessary to get a better representation of (Temperature)
the fire rather than a set of discrete output points. Each point estimate is Active sounds model Iwatani et al. Yes (Sound)
based only upon the current sensor data and all fire estimates are in­ (2017)
dependent in the time series. The authors sought to resolve the afore­ Bag of words Foggia et al. (2015) Yes
approach
mentioned problems by proposing a recursively dynamic clustering
PDS method Liu et al. (2015) Yes (GPS)
algorithm to give solution as a circle, which is represented by a center
and a radius and can cover a dense region consisting of most of the fire
point estimates in the time series to some extent. Thus, the real fire internet and such) to be pre-installed onsite. This is a major drawback
points can be contained in it with a higher probability (Duan et al., not only because fires can potentially break out anywhere, but also
2011). demands costly equipment and skilled manpower, all of which could
Wang, Martin, & Kaiser (2005) combined far field and near field pose a problem in the case of third world countries. GPS systems have
algorithms to resolve the problem of robust fire source localization blind-spots too, and relatively primitive systems such as fire alarms and
under the conditions of planar or circular wave fronts of hot gas, which temperature sensors require physical presence for confirmation of a
are based on signal delay estimation and replicas of a source signal breakout, and do not help much when it comes to finding out the di­
through spatially distributed sensor arrays. rection of spread of fire or its intensity within a particular area. Thus,
Yasushi Iwatani et al. (Iwatani et al., 2017) focused on sound analysis considering the aforementioned challenges, we require agents which do
with respect to different sound frequencies, smoke concentration level not need to be pre-installed, which can be remotely controlled, which
and heat release rates. The sound property is shown to inform the ex­ can maneuver in multiple directions in space, can relay data with min­
istence of flames in the sound path. This work makes use of the fact that imum loss to the command center and can share data with other agents
when sound passes through fire, decay of sound takes place. The to increase efficiency of the operation and decision making.
decrease of the sound magnitude informs the presence of fire in the
sound path. The paper then proceeds to perform a time series analysis to 4. Fire behavior and impact analysis
determine the effect of flame and gas-flow on sound. This paper has
demonstrated that sound through flame fluctuated and the fluctuation Wildfire modeling attempts to reproduce fire behavior, such as rate
range is independent of the sound frequency, the heat release rate, and of the fire spread (ROS), direction, heat or intensity it generates, fuel
the combustion process. Hence, this result combined with 2D or 3D type or vegetation matter, topography, weather climate, seasonality
sonar scanning generates depth images with information of indoor en­ characteristics, water bodies, smoke/smog spread etc. All of these pa­
vironments and fire locations. rameters aids use of specific tools w. r.t forest fire suppression, warn and
Yunxiang Liu et al. (Liu et al., 2015) argue that GPS based method for evacuate public, help fire fighters and medical teams work through
locating are based upon the assumption that the GPS devices in our efficient strategies to save people, reduce risk, safeguard and minimize
region of interest have already been equipped. This work presents a new property damage, manage air quality from deterioration etc.
positioning method-PDS, with which firefighters without GPS can esti­
mate their positions by the messages gained through communication 4.1. Fire modeling
with firefighters with GPS. The localization of nodes is a centralized
process, and thus to improve upon this, they use a prediction of prob­ A quantitative fire model of forest fire plays a crucial role enabling
ability distribution-based approach. This work assumes that firefighters current and future fire localization, fire suppression and mitigation
can estimate the radius in which they can operate based on their location process, exposure level and risk to human settlements and properties.
and also the GPS radius. While this might make things easier in case we The target output of such models is to predict fire intensities, di­
need to prove formally, but the rationale to have this assumption is not rection and propagation of fire over time (rate of spread of fire front or
clearly discussed. fire contour) in response to the prevalent environmental or contextual
A summarized list of the discussed Fire localization approaches are conditions (weather/climate, landscape, ignition location, ignition fre­
captured in Table 2. quency, number of fire points, fire intensity etc.). Fire fronts represents
the fire flow that consumes sizable land area cover over time. In this
3.1. Challenges and future opportunities section, we present and analyze several recent forest fire models.
Forest fires can be described as a combination of two phenomena:
Significant developments have occurred in fire localization methods, burning of fuel to release energy and transport of that energy to
but even the most efficient, such as those based on CNN and image neighboring vegetation or fuel and its subsequent ignition. The former
processing still require the related equipment (high definition cameras, lies in the domain of chemistry while the later lies in the domain of
communication links between command centers, access to high speed physics.

6
A. Dhall et al.
The fire models can be divided into two broad categories: physical
and empirical models (Fig. 3). A physical model, as the name suggests
tries to incorporate both physics and chemistry of the fire spread. An
empirical model incorporates no physics at all. It is more statistical in
nature though in some cases it has some form of physical framework
underlying it.
Prometheus (Tymstra et al., 2010, p. 102) is a vector based deter­
ministic fire growth simulator designed to use Fire behavioral prediction
(FBP) spread rates. Farsite and Prometheus have been the more promi­
nent and widely used fire simulators based on the “Huygens” principle of
wave propagation. “Huygens” principle details the propagation of the
fire front in a fashion similar to a light wave, shifting and moving for­
ward continuously in time and space (Pais et al., 2019). WFR-Fire,
Firestar, FireTec etc., have been the more prominent ones in the phys­
ical based category. Firelib offers an optimized programming interface
for fire modelers to use in their 3D wildfire model and is built as a C
language function library. Firelib is derived from BEHAVE fire behavior
algorithm which is also used in the Farsite simulator.
Richard Rothermel (Rothermel, 1972) introduced a mathematical
model for predicting fire spread in wildland fuels for the first time. The
model could predict rate of spread and intensity of fire in a continuous
stratum of fuel on ground. The model thus was not applicable to crown
fires but included the fire through brush fields as they can be considered
reasonably close to ground. The model also excluded contributions from
firebrands to fire spread since not all firebrands were considered effec­
tive in advancing the fire. The fuel characteristics of the field/terrain
determine the input parameters of the model. The model produces mean
quantitative values of fire spread and intensity for given environmental
and fuel conditions. A static mathematical model of this kind could not
be effectively used to forecast behaviors of existing fires and required
further developments to rapidly update the fuel inventories on the
threatened sites.
Giorgio Guariso and Matteo Baracani (Guariso & Baracani, 2002)
combined Rothermel’s (Rothermel, 1972) rate of spread theory with
theory of cellular automata (CA) to create a software system for simu­
lation of small-scale fires in the Mediterranean region. The cellular
automata comprise of two layers: the upper layer representing crowns of
trees and the lower layer representing the surface coverage. The cellular
Fig. 3. Fire modeling approaches.
7
Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266
automata evolve as a result of local interactions when information about
own conditions is exchanged. Cells are considered to be burnable or
not-burnable. In the first case, different cell states include normal,
accumulating energy, burning or burned. Cells in second case are
considered inert and can never burn. In every step, cells update their
state in synchronous mode. Slope, air temperature and moisture data are
introduced into the model as coefficients. Wind effects based on Alex­
ander’s ellipse theory have also been included. The focus of this paper
was to build a complete software system that can retrieve real time GIS
data, simulate the forest fire, check the effects of possible actions and
help monitor the deployment of fire forces.
Ioannis Karafyllidis and Adonios Thanailakis (Karafyllidis & Tha­
nailakis, 1997) proposed a KT model for predicting forest fire in ho­
mogenous and heterogeneous forests spread using cellular automata.
The input for the model was a scalar velocity field R which indicated the
rate of spread of fire at every point in the forest, the forest fire front at
time t1, the wind speed and direction and the topography of the region.
The model could determine the fire front at any future time t2 > t1. The
wind speed and direction were accounted for in the model via the use of
appropriate coefficients for both strong and weak winds. Based on the
well-known fact that the fires show a higher rate of spread when they
climb up an upward slope and lower rate of spread when they descend a
slope, the coefficients considered in the model were taken to be a linear
function of height differences. The results generated for both homoge­
nous and heterogeneous hypothetical forests were found to be in good
agreement with fire spreading in real forests. The model was purely
mathematical with the coefficients too handcrafted to fit the model.
Herna �ndez Encinas et al. (Hern�
andez Encinas et al., 2007a) modeled
the forest fire spread in homogenous and heterogeneous environments
using a hexagonal cellular automaton. It considered the forest to be grid
of regular hexagonal cells. Just like the KT model (Karafyllidis & Tha­
nailakis, 1997), the wind and topography conditions were accounted
into the model as coefficients. Each cell is endowed with three unique
parameters: the rate of spread R, the wind speed W and the height H of
the cell. The cellular automata evolved in discrete time steps through a
set of local interactions defined by the transition function. The size of
discrete time step was taken to be the time needed for cells with larger
rate of spread to be completely burned out. The model was tested on
A. Dhall et al.
eight basic test cases incorporating both homogenous and heteroge­
neous forests. The results obtained were found to be in agreement with
spreading of fires in real forests. This model was a proposed improve­
ment over the KT Model (Karafyllidis & Thanailakis, 1997).
Onur Satir et al. (Satir et al., 2016) considered an artificial neural
network-based mapping for a Mediterranean forestland using a multiple
data assessment technique. Inputs to the neural network comprised of:
a) percent tree cover, b) elevation, c) F index calculated from wind
speed, relative humidity and dry bulb temperature, d) distance from
settlements, e) distance from roads, and f) distance from farmlands. A
basic feed-forward, back-propagation based ANN was used to estimate
fire probability in the Upper Seyhan Basin (USB) in Turkey. Relative
operating characteristics (ROC) were used to validate the model and the
coefficient of accuracy obtained for the multilayer perceptron was 0.83.
On statistical analysis, features like elevation, temperature and tree
cover were found to be strongly correlated to forest fire probability in
the USB region. The novelty of the study is in the use of neural network
to learn weights instead of handcrafted coefficients however the model
could only predict static fire probabilities instead of dynamic evolution
of fire fronts.
Zhong Zheng et al. (Zheng et al., 2017) proposed an extreme learning
machine for forest fire spread simulation using CA. Associated with each
cell in the grid was a probability P, given as the product of igniting
probability p and the coefficient t which encapsulated neighboring wind
effects caused by cell’s neighborhood. The cell was considered to be
burning if the probability P was above a certain threshold t. Existing
vegetation data and topographic data were used to train a neural
network for predicting the igniting probability. Existing vegetation data
included the existing vegetation type (EVT), existing vegetation height
(EVH) and the existing vegetation cover (EVC) while the topographic
data included aspect, elevation and slope. Around 14,000 distinct
samples with input values and igniting probabilities were extracted and
used in the study. Five fires: Coal Seam Fire, Spring Creek fire, Big Elk
Fire, Bear Fire and Mustang fire were simulated in the study with Area
under the curve (AUC) scores obtained for the five fires were around 0.7.
Vasileios G. Ntinas et al. (2016) presented a data driven parallel
fuzzy cellular automata approach for wildfire spreading. The model
advances its performance and accuracy by applying fuzzy rules which
encompass a fuzzification and a defuzzification procedure. A fuzzy
approach is used to represent the fire level of each cell while several
parameters associated with topography, wind and fuel characteristics
have been incorporated into the model through a data driven approach.
The model allows adaptation of propagation rules to specific landscapes
by learning its internal parameters from real forest fires. To overcome
the significant computational cost, the authors have described a parallel
processing approach using FPGAs and GPUs. The model was evaluated
by simulating two real wildfires in Italy: July 2007 fire in the area of
Iglesias and August 2004 fire near Budoni village. The model was cali­
brated to obtain the best agreement with observed fires and was shown
to generalize at an acceptable loss of accuracy. However, the model
requires the data on past wildfires for applying it to a given region. The
model also shows risk of over fitting parameters during calibration. On
tackling these problems, the framework can be effectively used to
simulate forest fires in real time through its efficient GPU parallelization
that enables fast calibrations.
A. Hern� andez Encinas et al. (Hern� andez Encinas et al., 2007b) pre­
sented an improvement over the KT model (Karafyllidis & Thanailakis,
1997) to achieve a more realistic simulation. They modeled circular
spreading of fire front when it comes from diagonal cell over linear
spreading as in the KT model.
Bianchini et al. (Bianchini et al., 2015) presented a new method to
forest fire spread prediction called Evolutionary Statistical System (ESS).
All classical models predict based on a single simulation whereas the ESS
generates predictions based on statistical analysis of population of cases.
Each scenario is considered to be a different setting of individual pa­
rameters where the parameters can take values within a range. Only a
8
Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266
sample of the total population of individuals is considered by ESS. The
population evolves through variation operator (mutation and recombi­
nation) and selection operators of the evolutionary algorithm. The pa­
rameters used for forest fire model include fuel, wind speed and
direction, slope, aspect, 1-h dead fuel moisture, 10-h dead fuel moisture,
100-h dead fuel moisture and live herbaceous moisture. The two staged
implementation includes an Optimization stage and a Calibration stage
which implement evolutionary algorithms and statistical component
respectively. The parallel version of this implementation used a
master-worker paradigm wherein the master allocates the job to the
workers who work independently of each other and return results to
master. The method was verified and compared with other methods by
testing it on five controlled burns under different settings. This combi­
nation of evolutionary algorithms with statistical calculations is
promising.
A summarized list of the discussed Fire model approaches are
captured in Table 3.
4.2. Uncertainty analysis
Uncertainty analysis provides important information for modelers
and analysts, aiding selection of appropriate data and modeling tech­
niques, and guiding model calibration and validation efforts. Uncer­
tainty analysis in detail focuses on the identification and classification of
sources of uncertainty and describes how to analyze wildfire models
(Riley & Thompson, 2017).
Spatio-temporal forest fire spread, or progression or dynamism
behavior is influenced by uncertainties inherent in nature and also un­
certainties caused by human driven. Uncertainties could be classified
into: a) ignition frequency and location, b) weather factors, c) landscape
factors, and d) human management controls or response actions. Initial
fire ignition could be caused by either natural happenings such as
lightning, prevailing weather conditions etc., or could very well be
human induced. Weather factors could be due to current, seasonal and
future climatic conditions specific to temperature, wind direction, wind
moisture, wind speed, precipitation, relative humidity etc., in the forest
area. Landscape factors details out the geographical vegetation types
and vegetation cover (is treated as fuel source and fuel type), topog­
raphy elevation and/or slopes, fuel composition, structure, and conti­
nuity of fuels (flammable vegetation), en-route water sources etc.,
influencing the formation, fire intensity, rate of spread (ROS) fire be­
haviors leading to fire physics patterns such as: firestorms, jump fires,
crown fires, surface fires, ground fires, upslope fires, downslope fires,
merge fires, split fires etc., All these uncertainty factors play and influ­
ence the number of fire front formations, fire extent or perimeter, rate of
spread, burn probability, and fire intensity.
Karin Riley and Matthew Thompson (Riley & Thompson, 2017)
proposed classification different types of uncertainties in wildfire sce­
narios. The author’s look at uncertainty modeling for different land­
scape sizes and time horizons i.e., short-term, long-term etc., dealing
with uncertainty about the timing and location ignition, landscape and
weather conditions driving fire behavior leading to risk-based charac­
terization of wildfire variables to help support management decisions.
With uncertainty modeling, some sources of uncertainty could be rep­
resented statistically (example, temperature distributions, precipitation
etc.) and some sources of uncertainty could be represented as scenarios
(example, landscape vegetation variables). Also, the authors have
modeled uncertainty planning for different timeframes such as incident,
mid-term and long-term. Incident and mid-term planning horizons, ig­
nitions and weather tended to be dominant and is possible to quantify
with a statistical level of uncertainty, but landscape and management
factors tended to have a scenario level of uncertainty across all planning
horizons. In long-term uncertainties, human-natural systems, changes in
wildfire policy, land use and vegetation dynamics and climate changes
are considered. In modeling certain uncertainties, there is an inability to
quantify spatiotemporal landscape patterns, or accommodate slight
A. Dhall et al. Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266

Table 3
Summarized Fire models.
ethodology Literature Outcome Static or Limitations
Dynamic

Huygens principle of wave
propagation
Mathematical model for first fires
based on empirical tests
Two level cellular automata model
Cellular automata model for
homogeneous and heterogeneous
forest
Use of hexagonal cellular automata
over 2D grid cellular automata
Artificial neural network with back
propagation to predict fire
probabilities
Machine learning based model to
derive igniting probabilities
Use of fuzzy rules to represent cell
state
Predictions based on statistical
analysis of population
(Pais et al., 2019; Tymstra, Bryce,
Wotton, Taylor, & Owen, 2010, p.
102)
Rothermel (1972)
Guariso & Baracani (2002)
Karafyllidis and Thanailakis
(1997)
Hern�
andez Encinas et al. (2007a)
Satir et al. (2016)
Zheng et al. (2017)
Ntinas, Moutafis, Trunfio, &
Sirakoulis (2016)
Bianchini et al. (2015)
Rate of spread rates or fire growth, Dynamic Do not always produce outputs consistent
fuel consumption, fire intensity with observed fire growth, difference may be
significant.
Rate or spread Intensity of fire Static Crown fires not considered
Temporal and spatial status about Dynamic Coefficients are not learnt
Burned or burning Accumulated
energy
Temporal and spatial state of Dynamic Handcrafted parameters
cellular automata
Temporal and spatial state of Dynamic Handcrafted coefficients
cellular automata
Fire probabilities for each area Static Gives one shot fire probabilities, does not
capture fire propagation with time
Temporal and spatial state of Dynamic Unlearnt wind coefficients
cellular automata
Temporal and spatial state of Dynamic Sample data from past wildfires Over fitting
cellular automata risk
Predicted fire line Dynamic Restrictive use of parallelism in model
execution

error bounds on measurements of variables such as vegetation charac­
teristics. Authors based on their wildfire uncertainty analysis, have
inferred that uncertainty increases as the spatial and temporal scale of
the fire modeling analysis increases. Also, there is definite gaps or
ignorance with conceptual understanding of basic fire physics across all
planning horizons, changes in the relationship between fuel character­
istics and ignition probability and fire spread, changes in storm patterns,
and vegetation conditions.
Matthew P. Thompson and Dave E. Calkin (Thompson & Calkin,
2011), in their work have classified forest fire uncertainties into the
following categories: variability uncertainty, knowledge uncertainty,
and decision uncertainty. Variability uncertainty refers to the inherent
variability that manifests itself in natural systems. This uncertainty is
also referred to as external, objective, random, or stochastic (example,
ignition frequency and ignition locations, or the weather conditions).
Probabilistic approaches are most often used to handle variability un­
certainty, such as modeling fire occurrence, spread, and/or intensity.
Knowledge uncertainty refers to the limits of our knowledge or gaps in
our knowledge or understanding (example, uncertainty propagation in
fire behavior). An expert system helps mitigate knowledge uncertainty
(knowledge-based systems, hierarchical multi-attribute models, logic
models, fuzzy set theory, neural networks). Decision uncertainty refers
to imperfect information involved in social cost/benefit analysis. It is
also referred as value uncertainty or preference uncertainty. This type of
uncertainty is usually handled with some form of a value measurement
method (example, Analytic Hierarchy Process, utility theory, outranking
models, and social choice theory). Managing decision uncertainty is
challenging due to the presence of many stakeholders with dynamic
perspectives, perceptions, and objectives.
Zhiyong Wang (2015) discussed uncertainties with predicted infor­
mation of hazards from hazard simulations. Such uncertainties could be
due to model errors in source spatial data and inherent uncertainties
with real-time data collected from field. For example, it is difficult to
predict forest fires due to variety of factors, though fire model can be
derived using real-time data can be obtained through sensor and
communication network. These factors could be randomness in weather
conditions, such as: winds, precipitation, humidity, errors or incom­
pleteness with models such as terrain models, land use models etc. Some
ways to address issues on uncertainty modeling is by using Bayesian
belief networks (BBNs), analytic method, Taylor series method, sensi­
tivity analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, Monte Carlos method, Bayesian
network model, predictions and expert judgement etc.
4.3. Hazard and risk modeling
“Hazard” can be expressed as potential fire behavior (e.g., fire in­
tensity, spread) or fuel property or potential impact to human settle­
ments and properties. “Risk” is used to describe the probability that a
fire might start/ignite or likelihood to impact humans owing to fire
hazard. Comprehensive fire models are an important first step towards
providing spatially explicit estimates of fire risk and hazard over a range
of spatial and temporal scale (Keanea et al., 2010). Hazard and risk
heat/digital maps can be used for fire management response planning
and real-time wildfire operations. A quantification of fire hazard and
risk is critical for identifying and prioritizing areas for fuel fuels treat­
ments. Quantification of fire hazard and risk often is a difficult task due
to (1) the complexity of fire events across multiple time and space scales,
(2) the effects on the ecosystem, and (3) evolutionary changes in fire
types/behaviors that are created by these fire events over time (Keanea
et al., 2010).
Robert E. Keanea et al. (Keanea et al., 2010) proposed a modeling
method called FIREHARM (FIRE HAzard and Risk Model) to map fire
hazard and fire risk. FIREHARM computes common measures of fire
behavior, fire danger and fire effects to capture spatial fire hazard.
FIREHARM is a modeling platform which can use either previously
developed fire models such as FIRELIB, FOFEM, NFDRS etc., or can be
used to integrate new fire models if required. FIREHARM uses inputs
represented by a list of polygons that define areas of similar vegetation,
fuel, and landscape topography conditions. FIREARM uses input pa­
rameters which include fire behavior fuel models, fire danger fuel
models, and fire effects fuel models. FIREARM uses weather data from
DAYMET database which tracks daily spatial surfaces of temperature,
precipitation, humidity, and radiation of a terrain. FIREHARM outputs
a) Fire behavior variables such as: fire line intensity, spread rate, flame
length, and crown fire intensity, b) Fire danger variables such as: spread
component, burning index, energy release component, and
Keetch-Byram drought index, and c) Fire effects variables such as: smoke
emissions, fuel consumption, soil heating, fire severity, tree mortality,
and scorch height.
Zhiyong Wang et al. (2017) employed an approach to use hazard
model and simulations to provide the information of the obstacles (e.g.,
location, shape, speed), to support navigation during disasters. This
information would help first responders, fire fighters, medical teams
reach points of interest safely by avoiding obstacles. By avoiding ob­
stacles, we might expect delay in taking a safe route which could take

9
A. Dhall et al.
longer. Also, responders usually have protective equipment which al­
lows them to pass through certain levels of hazards, it is also very
important to investigate how to find routes that allow responders to pass
through the obstacles but have limited risk. The authors have proposed a
Monte Carlo simulation method to quantify the influence of the uncer­
tain obstacles on the road network, and have also proposed a modified
A* algorithm called MOAAstar (Moving Obstacle Avoiding A*) algo­
rithm to deal with the uncertainty and generate fast and safe routes
passing though the obstacles.
Zhiyong Wang and Sisi Zlatanova (Wang & Zlatanova, 2019) pro­
posed a new path planning Dijkstra algorithm to generate fast and safe
routes for rescue teams or first responders through moving obstacles,
taking into account the influence of obstacles on the status of road
networks and the speed of rescue vehicles, which aims at minimizing the
total risk value that the first responders would encounter while con­
straining the travel time of routes.
Sonti et al. (Sonti et al., 2013) present a grid-based path planning
algorithm using probabilistic finite state automata (PFSA) and address
the routing problems in the presence of dynamic obstacles with sto­
chastic motion models.
Claudia Vitolo et al. (Vitoloa et al., 2019) proposed a methodology to
identify areas prone to concurrent hazards (example heat stress and fire
danger). Multi-hazard scenarios become prominent as the combined
impact or hazard is far higher than when considering hazards inde­
pendently. People could be less resilient when exposed to multiple
hazards. Examples of fire danger or hazard rating systems are the US
Forest Service National Fire Danger Rating System, the Canadian forest
service Fire Weather Index, and the Australian McArthur rating systems.
All these systems provide estimates of fire danger in terms of indices that
measure fire behavior, energy release and rate of spread if a fire were to
start. Similarly, there exists a Fire Weather Index (FWI) of the European
Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) and the Global Wildfire Infor­
mation System (GWIS) respectively the European and Global platforms
for fire danger information. The FWI combines the rate of spread and
fuel availability to provide a generic numeric rating of potential fire
intensity used as a metric to quantify fire danger.
4.4. Challenges and future opportunities
The CA modelling approaches for fire modeling works very well in
most cases, but the performance largely depends upon the hand
configured local transition rules. Moreover, the parameters used for
predicting fire like wind, topography, fuel, etc. are incorporated into the
model as coefficients which also require fine tuning to make them work
better for specific areas. A data driven model which can learn the co­
efficients and other parameters is the need of the hour. A neural network
can exactly be used to do so - ‘fit the parameters. Because CAs consider
neighborhoods of cells to predict the next state, a convolutional neural
network might be best suited for the purpose. Instead of red, green and
blue frames of an image, one can feed wind, topography, temperature
heat maps to such a convolutional neural network. The convolution
layer can be defined appropriately to account for neighborhoods to
predict the next state. Since the next state is also a function of current
state, the possibility of use of recurrent convolutional neural network
also exists. These neural networks can learn the behavior of fire and can
incorporate dynamic changes into the system. An online model which
can adapt itself based upon the time series data of an in-progress fire is
worth investigating. The critical bottleneck currently is the availability
of large real time data of an in-progress fire needed to achieve better
accuracy. Fire models are yet to reach a stage where it can forecast fire’s
propagation accurately. Further research is required to help understand
fire movement and plan fire mitigation and rescue operations
effectively.
Multi-hazard scenarios become prominent as their combined impact
or hazard is far higher than when considering hazards independently. It
could be interesting to investigate hazard impacts due to co-related
10
Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266
factors (example, humidity and dry heat waves) and their occurrence
in relation to wildfires (Vitoloa et al., 2019).
Forest fire spread or behavior is driven by fire physics and plays a big
part in fire formations/patterns such as: firestorms, jump fires, crown
fires, surface fires, ground fires, mass fires, upslope fires, downslope
fires, merge fires, split fires etc. Fire formations due to Extreme wildfire
events (EWE) are always a challenge to manage. EWE causes fires such
as crown fires, eruptive fires (e.g., blow-up fire), jump fire, fire storms,
mass fires or area fires etc. Out this, eruptive fire formations are due to
extreme acceleration of a blow-up fire or jump fire in a limited space and
time. On the other hand, firestorm formations are formed by the coa­
lescence of different individual fires, and mass fires are caused by
multiple ignitions owing to lightning or human factors. Most often, EWE
fires are either wind or plume-driven, and are highly turbulent, chaotic,
exhibit unpredictable fire spread (ROS) behavior, and virtually impos­
sible to control. All of these makes EWE fires difficult to model and act
upon, thus requiring further investigation (Tedim et al., 2018).
5. Victim localization
We consider UAV swarm’s perception component to detect the
presence of any victim in UAV’s proximity. This perception or sense of
detection can be achieved by using camera as an input and analyzing the
captured frames. Detecting disturbances in UAVs environment prox­
imity for possible victims could be done by using Doppler radars and
analyzing the received signals or by thermal sensing i.e., detecting
thermal signature of humans or by analyzing audio signals perceived by
the UAVs. Sample victim detection methodology categorization is
captured in Fig. 4. Please note that different detection approaches have
different set of challenges. In the case of forest fires scenario, we cannot
rely on thermal sensing to detect victims, due to interference from
thermal signature of fire. Whereas, in the case of earthquake scenario
thermal sensing will be an appropriate technique. Similarly, using audio
signal analysis can be ineffective in case of forest fires, as the system
must isolate numerous dynamic noises which cannot be modeled to
serve the purpose. In a disaster scenario, people tend to exhibit chaotic
or panic behavior, which makes the victim detection process more
difficult.
Marina Trierscheid et al. (2008) used hyper spectral imaging to
detect victims from the captured frames. It is more robust and responsive
to cases where victim is covered in ashes due to fire scenario, and also in
the situation where there is poor or non-uniform illumination. Hyper
spectral imaging is also invariant to other sort of occlusions because it
does not consider the pixel intensities instead it draws information from
such large portion of light spectrum associated with each pixel. Hyper
spectral imaging can be an expensive option if we are considering swarm
UAVs (multi-bots) searching for victims in its vicinity.
Wing-Yue Geoffrey Louie and Goldie Nejat (Louie & Nejat, 2013)
introduced a technique which can be considered cost effective owing to
using robot with a normal camera and portable projector mounted on
the rescue robot itself. Here, the robot captures 3D sensory data with just
the camera and projector by projecting reference patterns on the frames
captured by the camera. The camera captures and processes the frame to
estimate the sense of depth using perceived transformations in the
reference patterns of the frame. This technique is more appropriate for
bounded fire and earthquake scenario than forest fire scenario, due to
high unstructured terrain and dynamic obstacles that the robot has to
traverse through.
Di Zhang et al. (ZhangSalvatore Sessa et al., 2018) tackled the
post-earthquake scenario i.e., to detect the victims trapped under the
rubble. The authors suggest the use of CO2 sensor to narrow down or
reduce the potential search area and further use thermal camera to
localize and estimate the precise position of victims. This study uses
microphone as a proxy to the thermal sensors to detect the human
presence in the rubble. The authors proposed an algorithm to recognize
the potential human noises to supplement the localization process. To
A. Dhall et al.
Fig. 4. Victim detection methodologies.
recognize the human voice specifically, hard margin SVM classifier is
trained on the dataset containing voices of male and female subjects
communicating in different languages. This work uses feature vector
comprising of energy entropy, signal energy, zero crossing rate, spectral
roll-off, spectral centroid, and spectral flux to represent an audio file of
sample length. As disaster sites are usually noisy with lot of people and
vehicles, which invariably inhibits proper inferences from audio detec­
tion component. And as CO2 concentration estimates potential target
locations of casualties, still there could be cases where we will not able
to localize the causality due to limitations of thermal camera.
Fahed Awad and Rufaida Shamroukh (Awad & Shamroukh, 2014)
used a feed-forward neural-network (NN) with supervised learning
method to detect victims from the captured frames. The proposed system
uses signal from a passive infra-red (PIR) sensor as a cue to analyze the
frame captured at that time. NN is trained on the dataset comprising of
around 500 images containing human foot, hand and body in various
positions, and the NN is trained with 6 images (2 for each hand, foot, and
body) in a training cycle. Proposed System has average detection ac­
curacy of 86% for various experiment conducted in different environ­
ments, but to gain similar effective detection accuracy in real scenarios
where environment is dynamic and uncontrolled would require a larger
dataset resembling the desired situation.
Piotr Rudol and Patrick Doherty (2008, pp.1-8) used both thermal
and color images captured from UAV to detect human presence on the
ground. First thermal images are being analyzed to detect potential re­
gion of interest, after which the color image of concerned region of in­
terest is analyzed. Selected region of interest in color image is passed
through cascade of classifiers to classify it as either human or
non-human entity. To reduce the number of false positives, the authors
have proposed a heuristic approach. This system could face a setback in
the case of dense forest cover or smoke cover in forest fire scenario
where target is occluded.
Hao Sun et al. (Sun et al., 2011) proposed a system with tetrahedral
microphone array and used it for navigation as well as for localizing the
victim. The approach works dynamically avoid the obstacles while
pursuing the path to the track. Similar to other audio-based localization
techniques, the system remains unresponsive in the case where victim is
unconscious.
Kun-Mu Chen et al. (Chen et al., 2000) used microwave signals to
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detect victim trapped beneath the rubble pile. Results shows the system
can detect victims through a construction barrier of about 10 Feet and is
susceptible to noise interferences. Also, this system can result in pro­
ducing some false positive cases due to the interference caused by the
aftershocks.
Tahmid Latif et al. (Latif et al., 2016) used Madagascar hissing
cockroaches implanted with electrodes to control the steering capability
of the bio-bot. This approach uses microphone array to localize the
victims. Challenges with this system is that, not all insects respond to the
sensory stimulus and go with their instincts. Maintaining a perfect link
with central system will be difficult in disaster scenarios. Similar to (Sun
et al., 2011) unconscious victims are still out of the scope the system.
Peng Yang et al. (Yang et al., 2007) used tetrahedral microphone unit
to convert sound signals to electric signals. Study presents two locali­
zation algorithms based on spherical wave model and plane wave model
similar to (Sun et al., 2011). This approach works just fine even when the
target is close to the microphone. Authors conclude by stating that wave
model algorithm is appropriate if target (here, we mean victim) is far
enough and in the same horizontal level as that of the bot, and in other
conditions, spherical wave model algorithm will be appropriate. But for
an autonomous real-time system the approach has to stick to one
particular algorithm and also maintain an appreciable system
throughput.
A summarized list of the discussed Victim localization approaches
are captured in Table 4.
5.1. Challenges and future opportunities
Forest fire like scenario does emphasize the fact that, special tech­
niques as detailed by the above research approaches are required when
it is not possible for humans to access the potential victims (or victim
sites) either because of vast search area or inaccessible area because of
rubble, fire and other obstacles. Each methodology discussed have some
limitation to their scope of work for example visual methods fails in the
case of occluded victims, auditory techniques are prone to the inter­
ference which are too common to be ruled out in the disaster scenario.
Hyper spectral imaging is not cost effective and thermal imaging results
in false positives usually in areas with fire.
A. Dhall et al. Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266

Table 4
Summarized Victim localization approaches.
Methodology Literature Receptive to visual Receptive to Unconscious or immobile victims
conditions noise handled

Hyper spectral imaging Trierscheid, Johannes, Paulus, & Balthasar (2008) Yes
3D reconstruction Louie and Nejat (2013) Yes Yes
Thermal sensing (Rudol & Doherty, 2008, pp. 1-8; ZhangSalvatore Sessa Yes
et al., 2018)
Auditory signal (Latif et al., 2016; Sun et al., 2011; Yang et al., 2007) Yes
RGB images (Awad & Shamroukh, 2014; Rudol & Doherty, 2008, pp. Yes Yes
1-8)
Carbon-di-oxide ZhangSalvatore Sessa et al. (2018) Yes
estimation
Microwave radars Chen et al. (2000) Yes

6. Victim’s health condition
Victim localization process identifies the victims and ensures the
completion of search perspective of our goal. Next step is to secure or
rescue the victim, which requires to understand the victim’s health
profile when in duress. It is crucial to estimate the health condition or
severity of the localized victim so that appropriate medical assistance
and other resources can be efficiently or optimally allocated to care for
and secure the victim to safety. Estimating health condition of victims in
disaster scenarios such as forest fires is not a trivial task and requires in
considering both physical behavior of the victim and the psychological
aspect of the victim. Estimating a vague metric such as victim’s health
condition by non-human means (using UAVs or robots) is even more
difficult. So we suggest that even if robot is able to sense and provide
basic health vital signs of the victims, our plan is to augment certain
environmental parameters such as amount or density of toxic gases in
the vicinity of the victim, intensity of fire in the vicinity of the victim
etc., as proxy to estimate victim severity. In this survey, our focus is to
consider both victim’s basic health vitals and extent or expression of
pain as proxy for victim severity. We have technologies which uses
contact-less techniques to estimate the human vitals such as heartbeat,
breathe rate etc., to model possible medical conditions which victim can
be possibly subjected to. For estimating pain extent, many
methodologies based on facial and physiological cues have been pro­
posed. As we are dealing with UAVs, we have limited our scope to facial
part as estimating physiological traits is bit far-fetched for robots as of
today.
6.1. Human health vitals estimation
Estimating basic health vitals of the patients is a part of general tri­
aging process practiced by doctors and nurses. Such information helps
them perform a preliminary diagnosis where a detailed diagnosis is not
possible because of lack of resources and is accepted for simpler ail­
ments. Though, there could be many means or technologies to measure
these vitals, in our survey, we consider non-physical contact UAV
techniques to do the same. Sample human vital estimation technique
categorization is captured in Fig. 5.
Juraj Ste
� n � o et al. (Ste
� n � o et al., 2017) used dataset of 373 trauma
victims to devise a logistic model to calculate survival score of a victim.
Limitation with this approach is that, it is not scalable, and accuracy is
not guaranteed with dynamic contextual environment change scenarios.
Chuantao Li et al. (Li et al., 2015) used a 24 Hz Doppler radar to
estimate the pulse rate of victim using the displacement of human chest
during respiration. Generally, in non-controlled environment such as
forest or any unknown environment, various irrelevant sources of

Fig. 5. Human vital estimation approaches.

12
A. Dhall et al.
similar displacements such as movement of shrubs and flowers due to
wind, interference caused by wind to the reflected signals could impact
the estimates. So simply using frequency filters and Fourier transform to
extract the respiration signal from the received band of signals would
not work. Authors have approached the problem keeping in mind that
only way to distinguish respiration signals from the noise is to consider
periodicity nature of respiration signal. Authors suggest a pipeline of
process to recover the respiration signals using Baseline removal,
Self-correlation, and Adaptive line enhancer (ALE) techniques.
Isar Nejadgholi et al. (Nejadgholi et al., 2016) shared a similar goal
as to the previous paper (Li et al., 2015), but considered a relatively
difficult scenario, where target person can be in a state of motion or
exhibit movement of any body part. The authors approached the prob­
lem by dividing the monitored space into range bins and first detecting
the presence of the target in a particular range bin. Post which, signals
are filtered out to remove signals with frequency greater than that of
possible breathing and heartbeat rate. Next, a preprocessing step ensures
that the resulted frequency time series consists of harmonics of breath­
ing and heart rate. Any corruption due to noise is analyzed and corrected
using Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) algorithm which considers
multiple observation of the given linear signal. With analysis of Eigen
vector of the correlation matrix of observations, the common harmonics
are identified as they appear to be peaks in the pseudo spectrum. Using
this approach, it is possible to separate out the signals associated with
movement of body parts other than chest as-well.
Ting Zhang et al. (Ting et al., 2016) claimed that by simply analyzing
the frequencies regarding the heart and breathing rate is not appropriate
in emergency cases, where target does not exhibit normal tendencies. So
here a genetic algorithm with a cost function to cater to the difference
between the original and estimated values is proposed and acts as a fine
correction factor for the estimated values.
Zhibin Yu et al. (Yu et al., 2017) proposed a higher order
cyclo-stationary approach to detect heart and respiration rate using CW
Doppler radar. This method remains invariant to the Gaussian in­
terferences as higher order cyclo-stationary of any Gaussian signal is
theoretically zero. Higher order cyclo-stationary also remain invariant
to the non-cyclic signals even when the cyclic frequency is non-zero.
This study performs various experiments in different situations to
prove the applicability of third order cyclic cumulant to detect heart and
respiration rate.
Fig. 6. Pain estimation methodologies.
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Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266
6.2. Challenges and future opportunities
As most of the techniques discussed are based on radars, thus makes
these techniques susceptible to interference from external natural fac­
tors. Advancements have been proposed to overcome or suppress these
interferences. But still much work has to be done to further ameliorate
the accuracy attained by these systems. Another limitation is the
maximum distance at which the detecting device can satisfactorily es­
timate human health vitals. As these systems come into play where
direct contact cannot be made with victim so distance as a threshold can
be a significant limitation which should be addressed.
7. Victim’s pain estimation
Pain estimation becomes critical in situations when the victim or the
concerned person is unable to communicate the pain through verbal or
signage. Studies in recent past have approached the problem of pain
estimation with different modalities such as physiological cues such as
heart rate and skin conductance (Treister et al., 2012), analyzing pat­
terns of hemodynamic brain responses towards pain stimulus using NIRS
(Yücel et al., 2015), fNIRS (Aasted et al., 2016), fMRI (Wager et al.,
2012), analyzing facial expression In this survey, we will focus on pain
estimation using facial expression, due to constraint of wildfire envi­
ronment and using UAV to capture victim’s facial profile. Sample pain
estimation technique categorization is captured in Fig. 6.
Pau Rodriguez et al. (Rodriguez et al., 2017) used raw preprocessed
images as input to the pre trained Deep Convolution Neural Network
VGG-16 (Simonyan & Zisserman, 2014) to regress the facial features. A
preprocessing process uses facial landmarks or templates to crop and
frontalyze victim’s face. Features generated by the DCNN are then fed to
LSTM (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997) to model the temporal fea­
tures as well. Each frame considers past 16 frames for regressing its
value. Proposed methodology also takes care of imbalanced training
data with comparable high number of neutral frames as opposed to the
frames with representing pain.
Daniel Lopez Martinez, Rudovic, & Picard (2017,pp. 2318–2327)
pointed out the problem that a single trained model to regress pain
extent cannot be precise for different targets as different people have
different facial expressiveness of pain. So, a hierarchical architecture
with estimating PSPI (Prkachin & Solomon, 2008) scores with
A. Dhall et al.
bidirectional LSTM, taking a window of frame sequence as input. Esti­
mated PSPI scores are concatenated with target specific (Individual
Facial expressiveness score (I-FES) and then given as an input to HCRF
(Quattoni, Collins, & Darrell, 2005, pp. 1097–1104) model. This
approach claims to capture the individual expressiveness of pain but at
same time creates a need of past ground truth values of their reported
pain.
Dianbo Liu et al. (Liu et al., 2017) proposed a hierarchical archi­
tecture to get a personalized pain estimator, but without the constraint
of having previous records of the target person. At first stage frame level
Visual analog scale (VAS) scores are being estimated with fully con­
nected neural-network trained in multitasking manner. Statistics ob­
tained by first stage are then given as input to Gaussian process (GP)
regression model with Radial Basis function (RBF) and Automatic
Relevance Determination (ARD) kernel to encode the frame and
sequence level dependencies between the VAS scores.
Marco Bellantonio et al. (2016, pp. 151–162) presented a hybrid
architecture of Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent
Neural Network (RNN) to capture both spatial and temporal information
from the video sequences. First, CNN generates feature vector for input
image in relatively reduced dimensions and then such vectors for mul­
tiple frames in a sequence are fed to the RNN to estimate the pain extent.
Philip Werner et al. (Werner et al., 2017) formulated facial activity
descriptors using the facial landmark and head pose vector. Descriptors
consist of gradients and 3D distances between the facial landmarks
which better describes the spatial features than just the facial landmarks.
Facial descriptors are in turn used as input for different classifiers such
as random forest and Support Vector machine (SVM) or SVM-RBF to
classify pain levels.
7.1. Challenges and future opportunities
Need for estimating pain level arises when target person is incapable
to communicate his or her pain to either first responder or medics.
Various techniques to estimate pain based on the facial features have
been considered, and basically, all of them have some inherent limita­
tions viz., poor image quality, occlusion and unfavorable surrounding
conditions. Other than this as proposed by (Daniel Lopez Martinez et al.,
2017, pp. 2318–2327), using a single trained model to regress the pain
level is not fool proof, as different people could exhibit different traits of
expressiveness. Need for prior knowledge about specific technique is a
setback in practical implementation, such as, dealing with the visual
shortcomings, and focusing on the personalized model rather than a
generic one could be a good research direction to move forward.
8. Management response and actions – quench fire, warn-
evacuate-secure and save people
Forest fire in its fury is highly destructive to nature/ecosystem,
human lives, lively-hood, and property. A good management plan and
response strategy is the need of the hour to warn, mitigate, save both
people and property from the onslaught of forest fires. Forest fire inci­
dent response entails the strategic and tactical deployment of fire­
fighting, responders, para and medical resources that generally aim to
restrict fire growth, save people in order to minimize loss of highly
valued resources while balancing safety and cost concerns (Riley &
Thompson, 2017).
A good Planning and response strategy involves a) evacuation plan-
to alert people at risk as to when to evacuate, b) evacuation strategy-to
help people move from place at risk to safer place, c) navigation route
plan-to select which navigation safe route/paths for civilians, rescuers,
firefighters, medical teams to take/select or avoid or wait before taking,
d) implementation or execution strategy-to evacuate people to safer
place, e) fire quench/suppression strategy-to allocate and deploy fire
fighters, use of specific fire suppression mechanisms without endan­
gering the safety of fire fighters, f) rescue and coordination strategy-to
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Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266
allocate and deploy rescuers (first responders, firefighters, medical
teams) to evacuate, secure and save people and properties without
endangering the safety of the rescuers, g) approach to handle dynamism,
uncertainties or exigencies with tasks involving high coordination of the
likes of fire suppression, evacuation, securing and saving people.
One factor of importance in people evacuation, is the departure time
of evacuees – how long can they continue to stay in the vulnerable
location and the time when they will have to leave their vulnerable
location. This time to leave depends primarily on their awareness, be­
liefs and priorities, and the adopted evacuation strategy owing to the
risk associated with the affected area (Beloglazov et al., 2016). During a
wildfire evacuation, the behavior of people is a key factor; what people
do, and when they do it, depends heavily on the spatio-temporal dis­
tribution of events within the scene (Beloglazov et al., 2016).
Anton Beloglazov et al. (Beloglazov et al., 2016) proposed an
approach to compute detailed projections of how evacuation scenarios
unfold with passing time using composes several simulations and
modelling systems, including a wildfire simulator, behavior modeler,
evacuation trigger model, and microscopic traffic simulator. Their
modelling approach provides risk metric, the exposure count, which
directly quantifies the threat to a population. Dynamic factors such as
wild fire rate of spread, fire intensity, hazard risk, exposure count,
evacuee behavior, prior and continued evacuation warnings, traffic,
possible path, all of which drive the evacuee outcomes. The wildfire
simulator uses cellular automata model for forest fire spread predictions
and includes models of the Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) and fire
suppression efforts. The output of the simulator is the spatio-temporal
fire front that is fed to the evacuation trigger model enabling compu­
tation of traffic driven departure times.
Li, Cova, & Dennison (2018, pp. 617–642) proposed an approach to
estimate evacuation time using fire and traffic simulation models to set
triggers. Also, the authors proposed a three-step evacuation process: a)
uses traffic simulation to estimate the total evacuation time for a
threatened community, b) derives the cumulative probabilities for
distinct evacuation times from multiple simulations and generates cor­
responding probability based trigger buffers, and c) evaluation of any
possibility of buffers using both fire and traffic simulation models to
examine the spatial configurations of fire perimeters and evacuation
traffic.
Drapalyuk, Stupnikov, Druchinin, & Pozdnyakov (2019) discusses
two types of fire suppression methods viz., direct or active methods and
indirect or passive methods. Direct methods suppress fire at the edge.
Indirect methods create barrier strips and barriers that prevent the
spread of fire, but with deliberate loss of area in creating the barriers.
Active methods are done to suppress fire types such as creeping fires.
Passive methods are done for fire types such as crown fires.
Resource allocation is critical part of any Search and Rescue opera­
tion, where strategic allocation of last mile human resource teams (first
responders, para-medics, medics, fire-fighters, support systems etc.) to
save maximum number of people and infrastructures ensuing the safety
of the resource team’s as-well in the process. This module epitomizes
human behavior and interactions between various human resource
teams, victims, appropriate use of static and dynamic knowledge from
other modules to take actions etc. Assuming that the means of distrib­
uting the resources is already optimized, rescue situation boils down to
resource allocation. Resource allocation has to account for navigation
path conditions, path networks, path junctions, path avoiding static or
moving obstacles, level of uncertainty or risk level of path and obstacles,
safe transport or navigation mode aspects based on type and multiplicity
of responders, destinations, and obstacles.
The problem to arrive at navigable path to secure victims to safety or
quenching fire fronts involving multiple responders, multiple victim site
destinations, multiple fire fronts with static and dynamic path obstacles
is considered as the NP-hard problem and requires use of select tech­
niques (Wang & Zlatanova, 2013, pp. 17–30) as captured in Fig. 7. Finite
state automata representation of quenching fire and securing victims to
A. Dhall et al.
Fig. 7. Navigation path planning approaches.
safety is depicted in Figs. 8 and 9.
With rescuing victim scenario, objective is to secure victims to safety,
assess and administer medical help as required – each and every human
life matter. Success of rescue victim scenario highly depends on avail­
ability of right type of resources in time of duress and minimizing the
elapsed time (optimal navigation path plan enabling responders to
victim site) to reach and secure the victims. With quenching fire sce­
nario, objective is to achieve timely and effective deployment (optimal
navigation path plans enabling fire fighters to fire front, optimal
resource allocation or configuration) of the relevant resources to maxi­
mize the containment of fire. We detail out relevant studies, which favor
heuristics and models to achieve both quenching and rescue operation
objectives.
Nada Petrovic et al. (Nada et al., 2012) proposed a minimalistic
model pertaining to wildfire dynamics using queuing theory and sto­
chastic processes. They divided the area of the potential site of fire into
discrete packets which begin to evolve when they start to burn or catch
fire. The rate of growth of the number of parcels in the queue is scaled up
with the current size of the queue, thus capturing the dynamism in the
spread of wildfire. The packets exit the queue when they are extin­
guished by suppression by a human agent (firefighters using water or
chemical suppressants) or by natural causes (rains, precipitation, hu­
midity, vegetation). The proposed model correlates with the observed
statistical distribution of the size of wildfire and helps in the analysis of
Fig. 8. Fire quenching process: Finite state automata diagram.
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Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266
tradeoffs in suppression efforts that are required for making decisions.
With respect to wildfires, this work is supposed to be an intermediate
between models with a study of a dynamic spread of fire (Donovan and
Rideout, 2003; Martin-Fernandez et al., 2002) and static fire models
(Islam & Martell, 1979; James & Martell, 1979). The primary focus is on
time related (temporal) dynamics. Still, spatial factors such as preposi­
tion of resources are still included in an implicit manner through the
time delay of resource arrival. Tradeoffs in timing and the strength of
fire are important when considering paradigms for resource allocation
to fires occurring simultaneously, which may evolve on different time
scales.
Daniel J Griffith et al. (Griffith et al., 2017) introduced a dynamic
resource allocation system for wildfire suppression. This work is based
on the use for Markov Decision Processes (MDP). Two approaches are
discussed: the first one being the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS),
which adaptively samples future trajectories to different sampling
depths as specified by the MDP. The other approach models the MDP as a
mixed-integer linear optimization problem and uses a commercial solver
for finding feasible/optimal solutions asserts that the mathematical
optimization works better for larger state spaces (and it has also been
empirically proven). This work also proposed a novel way in which the
usage of fire suppression teams and other resources such as chemical fire
suppressants can be optimally used.
Nezih Altay (Altay, 2012) addressed the resource allocation schemes
A. Dhall et al.
Fig. 9. Rescue process: Finite state automata diagram.
used by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), National
Incident Management System–Incident Resource Inventory System
(NIMS-IRIS), and various resources anticipated to be used as disaster
response and relief, all categorically classified. Author formulated an
allocation problem with a multi-resource, multi-location setup and
provide an integer programming solution and consider two cases where
supply exceeds demand and vice versa. In the case of disasters, wherein,
supply of resources exceed demand, the resource allocation happens in
such a fashion to provide help at the earliest, i.e., minimizing deploy­
ment and response time. Whereas, in the other scenario authorities have
to prioritize their supply allocation scheme. This study proposes a multi
objective function which not only addresses the total deployment time
but also the total capability deficit which a particular allocation scheme
incurs. But, as such situation happens to be always dynamic, this pro­
posed method does not address the dynamic allocation schemes.
Hui Cao and Simin Huang (Cao & Huang, 2012) addressed the ra­
tioning of crucial and scarce medical resources in immediate disaster
response scenario to achieve efficiency through a simulation model
using various heuristics for victim rescue, such as: first come first served,
random, most serious first, and least serious first. This model categorizes
resources such as doctors and equipment and, defines their capabilities
for simulation scope. Results of the simulation is a surprise, it suggests
that the principle to address the least serious patients first proves to be
efficient. This result finding seems to be medically unethical from
human perspective at the very least in concluding that first come first
served is better than other approaches. A perspective that could give
some rationale with this finding is that, when placing excessive
emphasis on serious patients could risk not caring for less serious pa­
tients’ health which could become worse while waiting for help to come
by. Firstly, this study as mentioned has only considered data from a
single event and also does not address types of injuries, treatment time,
etc. So, it may not be appropriate to use it for different events.
Felix Wex et al. (Felix et al., 2014) formulated a rescue unit assign­
ment and scheduling problem and proposed a hybrid solution that uses
modified multiple travelling salesperson problem and parallel machine
scheduling problem. Using these algorithms, as a component for opti­
mization model makes their approach NP hard, and to solve it, they have
proposed heuristics. Optimization model addresses the various capa­
bilities of the rescue units and the demand of incident sites. Study pro­
vides set of heuristics to arrive at an initial feasible solution and set of
improvement heuristics, when iterated, could arrive at new feasible
solutions based on optimality. Next, randomized Monte Carlo based
16
Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266
heuristic is proposed, so as to avoid getting stuck in local optimum
easily. Results show that Greedy heuristics prove out to be more relevant
in the disaster scenario. Proposed model has a limitation in the terms of
scalability due to the high computational needs. Also, this model does
not account for the time frame in which a particular incident site has to
be addressed owing to the victim’s severity level at the site.
Russell Kondaveti and Aura Ganz (Russell & Ganz, 2009) presented a
decision support system for first responders in any disaster situation
based on a hierarchical algorithm. Based on the information about the
victims and the resources available, victims are clustered based on the
Euclidean distance between any two victims. Resources are allocated to
various victim clusters subjected to minimize the total deficit incurred
by the allocation scheme. Then according to the allocation scheme
resource deployment centers are assigned to various victim sites using
an integer programming approach minimizing cost associated with
desired deployment strategy. Proposed method does not address the
dynamic case where new clusters can come into picture with ongoing
localization which requires the case where preemptive allocation of
resource needs to be considered.
8.1. Challenges and future opportunities
Rescue or secure task involves good amount of co-ordination viz.,
people-people, people-machine, people-process etc., Humans (first re­
sponders, fire fighters, medics) are the main actors in last mile secure
and saving victims. With human’s, decision making in a high duress
situation involves presence of mind of individuals and teams involved
with securing victims to safety. In life-death situations, facets such as
“on the spot high pressure decision making” or “on-the fly timely and
behavioral actions” or “imaginative responses” contribute to presence of
mind. Not to deny the fact that these decisions are highly crucial in
saving victims and is many times more important. More so, is it possible
to formulate processes to work perfectly in times of duress accounting
for “on the spot” decision making? Truth is, it is difficult to have pre-
defined processes that completely uses or considers the actual or true
situation on ground given many levels of contextual or influencer factors
and high variabilities. We will need to learn, unlearn and augment the
processes with experiential or tacit knowledge from the perspective of
the people on ground (human secure team comprising first responders,
fire fighters and medics). Understanding and accounting for behavioral
human aspects in high pressure situation is critical factor to save people
in a life-and-death scenario requires further systematic approach to
A. Dhall et al.
address this. During the disasters, the first responders or firefighters can
use equipment (e.g., masks, protective gears) that can protect them from
being affected by hazards. This protective equipment enables the fire­
fighters or first responders to pass through certain obstacles during their
emergency service (Wang et al., 2017). Hence, it is necessary to account
for or include protective gears worn by first responders or firefighters in
generating routes that are safe enough to pass though the obstacles
(Wang et al., 2017). In some situations, the firefighters or first re­
sponders can wait at certain places for dynamic obstacles to pass by to
arrive at the destination faster. Therefore, waiting could be an advan­
tageous option for certain types of disasters and should also be consid­
ered in the routing process (Wang et al., 2014). Another extension of the
data model is to meet more informational needs when multiple disasters
occur simultaneously (Wang et al., 2014).
9. Open opportunities and future way forward
Forest fire search and secure management encompasses different
modules or systems and requires coordinated “system-of systems” multi-
disciplinary solutions ranging from physical, behavioral, technology,
economics, processes and algorithms, psychology, historical, social and
more importantly common sense– use of knowledge from these varied
disciplines, applied in time synchrony, is required to achieve the
objective. With such a complex connected system, each system or
module in the operational process flow is important and needs to be
supported by optimal set of solutions to achieve both individual module
objectives as-well-as end-to-end holistic objectives. Use of right toolset
or solutions with right and timely knowledge set are important to ensure
different systems to act, interact and react to triggers, changes.
Contextual scenarios or circumstances drives as to which set of solutions
or tools or knowledge is applied or used in achieving the earmarked set
of goals.
Some questions worth looking are: Is it possible to generalize search
and secure management for varied disaster types (for e.g., forest fires,
flash floods, bounded fires, earthquakes, typhoons, cyclones etc.) as a
framework? It boils down to the commonality and uniqueness or dif­
ferences each of the disasters exhibit with other disasters. How do we
explicate the commonalities or uniqueness across or between different
disasters? How do we construct and use Knowledge coverage aspects
that considers or captures set of consequences in making use of the
available knowledge processes or actions (what-if’s) and set of knowl­
edge process actions to be used to achieve one or more consequence (if-
what’s)?
10. Conclusion
Adoption to purpose of learnt processes and techniques as tools is
crucial to reduce chance of losing human lives and damage to in­
frastructures due to disasters. This article summarizes the modules and
approaches involved in managing search and rescue operations in forest
fire scenario. For a successful holistic forest fire search and rescue
mission, it is critical that right methodology is adopted and coordinated
execution of each module in the “forest fire search and secure system’s
operation flow” meets the laid objectives both in individual and col­
lective terms. This survey presents some important recent works in this
area, contributions and improvements to literature, specific gaps that
have to be addressed, and also some of the open research challenges and
fundamental design principles for search and secure management sys­
tems. In summary, the aim of this study is to provide fundamentals about
search and secure management systems to help understand past research
contributions and future research direction and challenges in search and
secure management systems.
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Applied Geography 121 (2020) 102266
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