Modeling wildfire using evolutionary cellular automata
Maxfield E. Green, Todd F. DeLuca, Karl WD. Kaiser · 2020
With the increased size and frequency of wildfire events worldwide, accurate real-time prediction of evolving wildfire fronts is a crucial component of firefighting efforts and forest management practices. We propose a cellular automaton (CA) that simulates the spread of wildfire. We embed the CA inside of a genetic program (GP) that learns the state transition rules from spatially registered synthetic wildfire data. We demonstrate this model's predictive abilities by testing it on unseen synthetically generated landscapes. We compare the performance of a genetic program (GP) based on a set of primitive operators and restricted expression length to null and logistic models. We find that the GP is able to closely replicate the spreading behavior driven by a balanced logistic model. Our method is a potential alternative to current benchmark physics-based models.