A Coupled Framework of Cellular Automata-based Fire Spread Model and Water Distribution System for Dynamic Simulation of Urban Conflagration Events

One of the critical public safety roles for water distribution systems is suppression of urban fire events, and fire safety is a major concern for infrastructure and emergency response planners, managers, and regulators. Due to the interdependency of water systems and emergency services, water utility managers should design and manage a water distribution system carefully to mitigate consequences associated with urban fire events, through actions and decisions that may reduce threats to property and public health. One approach to mitigate urban conflagration may be through redesigning water distribution infrastructure to improve fireflows, and potential designs for new pipelines can be selected based on the costs of redesign and the reduction of threats to the water distribution system. A set of important dynamics and interactions between water distribution systems and fire response systems influence the performance of fire suppression strategies and should be considered in planning and management for both systems. Most existing fire spread and suppression models for disaster planning and management consider firefighting demands as static parameters. While a few have modeled the interconnection between water system and fire response, those, however, have not addressed the dynamic linking between the two infrastructures. Additionally, existing fire spread models may oversimplify the realistic fire spread process. A novel framework that dynamically interconnects water distribution and urban fire spread models can aid decision makers in developing disaster management strategies. A cellular automata (CA)-based fire spread model is developed in this research to simulate the gradual spread of fire in large urban areas. The CA-based fire spread model will be coupled with a water distribution system's model to capture the dynamics of urban conflagration, emergency response, and water distribution hydraulics. This framework will be used to generate strategies to improve water distribution systems' fire fighting capabilities through dynamically opening hydrants and enlarging pipe sizes. This methodology will be applied to a hypothetical case study of an urban water distribution system to explore possible fire mitigation strategies.