Bulletin

Issue: January/February 2007

News

Software for bushfire fighters

Simulated ‘bush fires’ - the fires you fight when not fighting a fire - are about to spread a lot faster and seem more realistic, thanks to a group of La Trobe University senior software engineering students.

Like aircraft simulators which train pilots to make complex decisions under extreme pressure to ensure passenger safety - the students’ new ‘GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Import Tool’ is designed to rapidly import elevation data from existing maps into a forest fire fighting simulator.

This allows for research and training aimed at helping Australia’s fire fighters make decisions in the complexity of realworld fire behaviour.

The students demonstrated their development at the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering’s ‘Industry-sponsored Software Engineering Project Presentation’ late last year at an awards evening hosted by the Dean of the Faculty of Science Technology and Engineering, Professor David Finlay.

Winning team members received their certificates and prizes from Professor Alexander Wearing on behalf of the Melbourne Complex Decision Research Group based in the School of Psychological Science. The Group’s primary research focus is to assess and improve decision making in complex time-pressured settings such as fire fighting.

Dr Torab Torabi, Coordinator of La Trobe’s Software Engineering Project, says four teams competed to develop the best GIS Import Tool and integrate it with existing ‘Networked Fire Chief’ (NFC) forest fire fighting simulation software.

Dr Mary Omodei, a senior lecturer in psychology, and Professor Wearing are the creators of the NFC software. Its development has been funded by the Australian Research Council and the Defence Science Technology Organization.

Dr Omodei says the GIS import facility will expand the research potential of the program and will be of particular benefit in the School of Psychological Science’s current project in the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre.

Dr Torabi says that because the slope of landscape has a very large effect on spread of fire, the new GIS Import Tool can rapidly include elevation data and display contour lines on screen, speeding up a process which until now has been done largely manually by people using the 12-year old NFC software.