Using Artificial Intelligence for Safe and Effective Wildfire Evacuations

Excerpt

Wildfire is a growing global concern for rural and urban areas [1]. Statistics show that the intensity and negative consequences of wildfire have increased in recent decades creating serious challenges for fire and emergency services, as well as communities in the wildland-urban interface [2-4]. As an example, 85 people lost their lives in California’s Camp fire, which made 2018 the deadliest US wildfire year in a century. To reduce the life safety risk of wildfire and to enhance the safety of communities threatened by wildfire, it is important to understand the physical and social dynamics characterizing wildfires [5]. Such an understanding will help to improve the design of the built environment in communities (e.g. buildings and transportation infrastructure) and enhance emergency planning by incorporating actual household evacuation behaviour. This incorporation of novel knowledge on evacuation behaviour will ultimately facilitate safe and effective evacuation during wildfire emergencies. To address this challenge, several wildfire evacuation models have been proposed in the literature and a comprehensive review of the modelling approaches is provided in Ronchi et al. [4]. …