Modelling Forest Fire Spread Through Discrete Event Simulation

Forest fires are becoming a more common occurrence in Portugal as well as worldwide. To extinguish or reduce them more quickly and effectively, it is crucial to understand how they spread. This paper presents a study and a model that shows how wildfires spread, assuming the forest can be represented by a graph, where the nodes correspond to forest stands and the arcs to the path between them. In order to do this, algorithms were developed in Python, using discrete event simulation, that allow modelling the progression of the fire on the graph. This fire propagation model takes into account several aspects of the forest, the wind being the most influential one. Some tests were performed, considering different ignition points, wind directions and wind speeds.