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

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