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| Firefighters organize at the Clark Peak Fire in southeastern Arizona's Pinaleno Mountains. |
What started out as a one-semester project for a UA graduate course is turning into software that could save millions of trees during wildfires.
Lewis Ntamio, now an assistant professor at Texas A&M University, got interested in developing software that would predict the direction and speed of forest fires when he was a UA Ph.D. student in 2003.
That's when Ntamio took ECE 575, Discrete Event Modeling, from Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Professor Bernard Zeigler. After completing that course, Ntamio continued to pursue the research as an independent study project, even though it wasn't directly related to his Ph.D. work with Professor Suvrajeet Sen in UA Systems and Industrial Engineering.
The forest fire software project "is more like a hobby than work," Ntaimo said. "It's very real and practical and less abstract. It's invigorating to see people envisioning this when we show them the research."
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The software allows firefighters to enter factors such as wind speed, wind direction, slope conditions, temperature and vegetation type (oak/chaparral, mixed conifer, etc.) into the software. Then the software creates a simulation of where the fire will go during the next several hours, allowing firefighters to focus their efforts in areas that will have the greatest effect on curbing the fire's growth.
The prototype software should be completed by December and may be used during the 2006 fire season.
The software is based on research that was originally funded by an NSF-sponsored collaboration between Sen and Zeigler. Ntaimo and Zeigler are now developing proposals to apply for funding from NSF and EPA so they can extend the software to include Ntaimo’s systems optimization research.
"This is how valuable research efforts often happen," Zeigler said. "They come out of the day-to-day, week-to-week work we do in class and in the lab. We look into various interesting things, not just those that are funded by a sponsor at the time. Eventually, a real capability emerges full-blown. That's when it may get some visibility and sponsor interest."
Ntamio now is collaborating on the project with Zeigler and Ph.D. Student Bithika Khargharia, of UA ECE, as well as with Zeigler’s former Ph. D. student, Maria Vasconcelos, of Portugal's Tropical Research Institute.
The first results from this research project were published in "Simulation Journal," Vol. 80, Issue 10, last October.
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