Emergency Management

The system enables the automatic generation of a firefighting plan for any forest fire, similar to a human expert.

Technical Challenge:

When a forest fire breaks out, this is an emergency situation where human lives may be in danger, and natural areas with abundant plant life, and often, protected plant and animal species, are threatened; response time is crucial.

The Environmental Committee of the Junta de Andalucía is responsible for combating forest fires in Andalusia.

In recent years it has invested a great deal of effort in improving the efficiency of the tools and resources which form part of forest fire control, within INFOCA (Plan for the Prevention and Extinction of Forest Fires in Andalusia). Part of the improved planning systems for firefighting is the transition from manual plan creation to the use of SIADEX (Intelligent System for Extinguishing Forest Fires).

When a fire breaks out and decisions must be made during the design of the extinguishing process, planners must adapt to the demands and dynamics of the fire, ensure compliance with regulations and legal protocols, manage all the information, co-ordinate available resources, and be familiar with multiple variables and characteristics of the fire zone, such as:

• Features of the terrain.
• Weather.
• Available access to the fire zone.
• Availability of air and land transport.
• Co-ordination and communication with different units and centres.

Solution:

Siadex is an Intelligent System for Extinguishing Forest Fires, integrating the IActive Intelligent Decisor, an intelligent component based on Smart Process Management technology, designed to help in the decision making process, capable of generating a process for extinguishing forest fires.

When technicians use it in extinguishing forest fires, they introduce the desired goal in the system, i.e., "extinguish forest fire" and, based on the knowledge and interactive reasoning process of the IActive Intelligent Decisor, SIADEX generates a process or several proposed processes which will be used by the technician as support when finally determining the extinction process to be used.

SIADEX was developed using the product IActive Knowledge Studio, which enabled the modelling of the expert knowledge of firefighting technicians; in other words, their expert knowledge is reproduced in the Intelligent System.

Advantages:

• Helps the firefighting technician. Facilitates the management of knowledge, information, resources, etc. despite the stress and pressure of the hostile and dynamic situation.

• Reduces the time taken to create a process. The Intelligent System creates the extinction process in just 10 seconds, while technicians doing the same task manually would take approximately 60 to 90 minutes.

• Homogenises the decision making process. Information is centralised in a single system (the Intelligent System), creating a true knowledge asset from scattered information on different platforms, which would otherwise make it difficult to design the firefighting process.

• Is an educational tool. As well as being used in real settings, the system can also be used to recreate past episodes, as a virtual learning tool for technicians.