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Estimating the Spread of Wildland Fires via Evidence-Based Information Fusion

2022; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1109/tcst.2022.3183645

2374-0159

Alexander A. Soderlund, Mrinal Kumar,

Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics

This article presents a new evidential reasoning approach for estimating the state of an evolving wildfire in real time. Given assumed terrain information and localized wind velocity distribution parameters, a probabilistic representation (i.e., the belief state) of a wildfire is forecast across the spatiotemporal domain through a compilation of fire spread simulations. The forecast is updated through information fusion based on observations provided by: 1) embedded temperature sensors and 2) mobile vision agents that are advantageously directed toward locations of information extraction based on the current state estimate. This combination of uncertain sources is performed under the evidence-based Dempster's rule of combination and is then used to enact sensor reconfiguration based on the updated estimate. This research finds that the evidential belief combination vastly outperforms the standard forecasting approach (where no sensor data are incorporated) in the presence of imprecise environmental parameters.