Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine

Published purpose

Current computational tools for the support of emergency evacuations in case of wildfire have three main weaknesses: Existing tools do not meet the emergency services’ needs for decision making and resource planning. Most existing tools assume the evacuation is a single-stage event (i.e., they do not address wildfire closure of routes, deployment of emergency resources or resident relocation), thus ignoring the multi-stage character of wildfires evacuations. Integrated solutions for evacuation modelling and resource optimization do not exist yet. The CONST Small teams project, selected in 2021 (Round 2) will address the three aforementioned weaknesses and build an integrated Resident Safety Platform (RSP) as part of its deliverables. The RSP will combine evacuation simulation and resource optimization in a way that the former will predict possible outcomes used by the latter. The integrated platform can be used by stakeholders to determine wildfire evacuation and resource allocation policies in an evidence-based manner. This collaboration with Imperial College specifically addresses the modelling of the fire and smoke spread in communities threatened by wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires and is a main input into the RSP.