Distributed Simulation and Web Map Mash-Up for Forest Fire Spread

The emergence of recent XML-based technologies paved the way for new types of architectures and message exchanges on the Internet through Web services. Mash-ups consist of combining existing systems capabilities in order to create new added value services. This paper focuses on a mash-up of different Web services that can be used by emergency planning teams and firefighters to better understand the behavior of wildfires. This mash-up uses a distributed simulation system (DCD++) and it combines it with the Global Weather service, displaying the results on a Google Map. The weather data is combined in real-time with the theoretical fire spreading model to obtain precise results. An XML-based solution has been developed in order to serve performance, interoperability and usability around a two-tier architecture consisting of a Java Servlet and a Javascript client. This effort paves the road for even more advanced solutions integrating the simulation location environment with geographic information system (GIS) data, which would highly improve the results obtained by the emergency managers.