Modeling Forest Fire Spread Using Machine Learning-Based Cellular Automata in a GIS Environment

Abstract

The quantitative simulation of forest fire spread is of great significance for designing rapid risk management approaches and implementing effective fire fighting strategies. A cellular automaton (CA) is well suited to the dynamic simulation of the spatiotemporal evolution of complex systems, and it is therefore used to model the complex process of forest fire spread. However, the process of forest fire spread is linked with a variety of mutually influencing factors, which are too complex to analyze using conventional approaches. Here, we propose a new method for modeling fire spread, namely LSSVM-CA, in which least squares support vector machines (LSSVM) is combined with a three-dimensional forest fire CA framework. In this approach, the effects of adjacent wind on the law of fire spread are considered and analyzed. The LSSVM is utilized to derive the complex state transformation rules for fire spread by training with a dataset based on actual local data. To validate the proposed model, the forest fire spread area simulated by LSSVM-CA and the actual extracted forest fire spread area were subjected to cross-comparison. The results show that LSSVM-CA performs well in simulating the spread of forest fire and determining the probability of forest fire.