SWeFS: sensor Web Fire Shield for forest fire detection and monitoring

Abstract

Fires are a common, disastrous phenomenon (hazard) that constitutes a serious threat for many years. Due to their speed of propagation and intensity they often lead to property damages, personal injuries and loss of human lives. The probability of forest fire eruption in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) is steadily increasing due to the climate change and human activities. WUI refers to all types of areas where forests, water bodies, and rural lands interface with homes, other buildings and infrastructures, including first and secondary home areas, industrial areas and tourist developments. The Sensor Web Fire Shield (SWeFS) research project designs, develops and demonstrates an integrated system of sensors, networking and computing infrastructure aimed to detecting, monitoring, predicting and assisting in natural hazards such as forest fires at the WUI zones. Its goal is to deliver: (i) a methodology for developing a novel Sensor Web platform for dynamic data-driven assimilation (DDDAS) for securing the WUI zones against environmental risks, and, (ii) a prototype DDDAS system specifically optimized/tuned for addressing the serious threat of forest fires in Greece. SWeFS pushes the state-of-the-art by combining and using technologies derived from multidisciplinary research in the areas of sensor networks, distributed vision systems, remote sensing, geographical information systems (GIS), data stream fusion, space-time predictive modeling and control systems.