A cellular automata model for forest fire spread prediction: The case of the wildfire that swept through Spetses Island in 1990 A. Alexandridis a , D. Vakalis b , C.I. Siettos c, * , G.V. Bafas a a School of Chemical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, GR 157 80 Athens, Greece b Department of Forest Resources Development, Ministry of Rural Development and Food, GR 104 32 Athens, Greece c School of Applied Mathematics and Physical Sciences, National Technical University of Athens, 9, Heroon Polytechneiou, GR 157 80 Athens, Greece article info Keywords: Forest wildfires Fire spread dynamics prediction Cellular automata Geographical information systems Spetses island Heterogeneous landscapes abstract We present and illustrate the simulation results of a cellular automata model describing the dynamics of a forest fire spread on a mountainous landscape taking into account factors such as the type and density of vegetation, the wind speed and direction and the spotting phenomenon. The model is used to simulate the wildfire that broke up on Spetses in August of 1990 and destroyed a major part of the Island’s forest. We used a black-box non-linear optimization approach to fine-tune some of the model’s parameters based on a geographical information system incorporating available data from the real forest fire. The comparison between the simulation and the actual-observed results showed that the proposed model predicts in a quite adequate manner the evolution characteristics in space and time of the real incident and as such could be potentially used to develop a fire risk-management tool for heterogeneous landscapes. Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Forest fires have been the cause of numerous and irreversible damages with deep ecological and socio-economic impacts. Entire ecosystems thriving with – also rare-animal and plant life have been wiped off while rural properties, villages and civil infrastructures lying along the verge of forests have also suffered from the ravages of wildfires which quite often result in the loss of human lives. What happened during the last days of August of 2007 in Peloponnesus was the worst damage of the last 100 years in Greece: a total of 2000 km 2 of forest and agricultural areas, mostly olive groves, burned in a few days by eight major wildfires with several smaller ignition points. The fires not only destroyed a major part of the southwestern Greek forest area and agricultural structure, but also threatened the archeological area of Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games and took a high death toll of 76 people plunging the country into mourning; most of them were locals and firefighters struggling to battle the blazes [1]. It is easily understood that the need for designing and developing effective ways of dealing with forest wildfires is con- stantly increasing as such phenomena appear ever more often. The fire suppression policies can be generally categorized into preventive and operational ones. Preventive policies are more strategic in principle, trying to minimize the likelihood of a burst of a fire by organizing the available resources and constructing anti-fire zones to hold up the spread of possible fire outbreaks. When a wildfire breaks out, drastic operational interventions are needed at a more tactical level, such as the effi- cient allocation of the defense mechanisms and the rapid evacuation of villages. In both cases, the strategic and tactic combat against the wildfires has much to benefit from mathematical models that could be used to predict the spread of the fire in 0096-3003/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.amc.2008.06.046 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: ksiet@mail.nuta.gr (C.I. Siettos). Applied Mathematics and Computation 204 (2008) 191–201 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Applied Mathematics and Computation journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/amc