Name
Firegate: A Computation Wildfire Spread Model with Machine Learning Guided Suppressant Optimization.
Kelly Liu
Description

As climate change and urbanization continue to intensify, an estimated 115 million individuals face heightened risks from wildfires. Existing operational models such as Rothermel’s, however, are constrained to rate-of-spread calculations and cannot reproduce full wildfire propagation patterns or burn area. To overcome these challenges, I a three-dimensional cellular automaton (CA) wildfire model that simulates fire spread through terrain interaction. This framework includes three main components: (1) landscape generation from satellite imagery using k-means clustering and elevation data; (2) a CA with a graph neural network derived transition rule that models heat radiation transfer, terrain effects, and ember transport; and (3) a Bayesian optimization model that identifies high risk zones to strategically place fire suppressant using a Gaussian Process (GP) surrogate to minimize computationally expensive simulations. Applied to the 2020 Los Angeles Bobcat Fire, the model closely reproduces mid-stage and final burn areas, achieving 93.2% and 89.9% accuracy respectively, with additional metrics such as precision, recall, F1-score, and IoU demonstrating further predictive strength. Then, Bayesian optimization was used to pinpoint suppressant placements, effectively reducing burn area 26.6% without exhaustive search. Overall, this integrated approach offers a powerful tool for anticipating wildfire behavior and optimizing real-time response strategies as fire risks continue to rise.

Sessionboard ID
31