WUI-NITY
At a glance
The project involved the development and testing of a evacuation simulation tool of wildland-urban interface fire evacuation.
Client: National institute of standards and technology
Date: 2020
Approximate construction value: $30k
Location: Roxborough, Colorado, US
The challenge
The project involved the development and testing of a evacuation simulation tool of wildland-urban interface fire evacuation. In doing so, data was needed to provide a benchmark against which the performance of model could be compared. At that time, sufficiently detailed / relevant data was not available.
Our response
MS-GHD and NIST staff deployed to Roxborough, Colorado to observe an evacuation exercise being conducted by the local community. This involved the simulated evacuation of the community – with a portion of the community taking part and driving to a designated refuge location at a designated time. Our staff captured departure times, route use and arrival times.
The impact
The capturing of this data was sufficient to develop a benchmark data-set. This enabled the simulation tool (WUI-NITY) to be configured using the initial conditions (e.g. the numbers involved, the response times, the distribution across the routes available) and comparison against overall performance (e.g. the arrival times at the refuge). This provided a simple validation case to assess the performance of the model, which was deemed positive and sensitive to the underlying factors deemed to be of importance during the observation (and from wider analysis). Work continues on the development and application of this tool across several projects, which is also producing conference and journal publications in the next few months.