| FOREST FIRES | MEFISTO | CINAR in collaboration with European companies and academic institutions developed the MEFISTO system. This system runs in real time on a workstation and supports the co-ordinator of fire fighting units in the dispatching with safety and efficiency in mind. The system provides information on the expected behaviour of the fire, the topography, the vegetation, the road network, the water replenishment points. Fire behaviour prediction is performed by a novel numerical model of CINAR. The model tackles the physics of the complicated phenomenon in contrast to the majority of available models which are empirical. The accuracy of the model has been validated through comparisons with past well documented fires. The fire spread rate and area burned is estimated within an accuracy of 15%. The MEFISTO system is currently available for pilot applications by the fire prevention or suppression authorities in training or operational mode | | FIREMEN | Following a three year research effort, CINAR developed the FIREMEN system that allows the estimation of the fire risk index. The fire risk index is the danger of a forest fire igniting at a particular point. The knowledge of this index is important since fire suppression units can be dispatched in the forest on the basis of this index, so as to minimise reaction time. It is well known that a forest fire can be easily tackled only in the first 15 minutes. For the estimation of the fire risk index the system uses satellite data which are classified using «fuzzy logic» techniques. The FIREMEN system runs on common hardware environment, available to public authorities involved in forest fire management like the Forest Service and the Fire Brigade. The system is suitable for the installation and use at Forestry or Operational Centre level. | | DELFI | DELFI is a special project by CINAR S.A., funded by the European Commission. The objective of the project was the formation of a European thematic network for organizing the existing knowledge and information on the field of Forest Fires. The scientific and practical issues covered by DELFI were distributed in three thematic groups : Fire Management, Forest Fire Behaviour Prediction, and Forest Fire Effects and Restoration. In the context of DELFI , a vocabulary which contains more than five hundred special terms related to forest fires was produced and edited in six european languages. | | UP | | |