Handling back fire in forest fire spread modelling
Résumé
This paper deals with forest fire spread modelling for simulation purposes. This activity is of critical interest for decision making support during fire suppression operations. Then, a short review of previous works on the topic is presented. We point out the use of elliptic shapes in forest fires modellind with, as a consequence, the presence of back fires in simulation results. This occurs whatever is the intensity of the fires main rates of spread. This fact is contradicted by observation of firefighters in our framewok, so we admit the existence of a threshold beyond which back fire should no longer be considered. Therefore, we introduce a new kind of shape obtained by means of the contraction of the rear part of a single ellipse. The use of this modified shape is then illustrated by a case study.