GisFFE—an integrated software system for the dynamic simulation of fires following an earthquake based on GIS

Fires following earthquake (FFE) are dangerous secondary disasters occurring after large earthquakes, leading to severe property and life losses in certain cities with dense wooden buildings. In order to explore the complicated behavior of fire-spread and to assess the fire-induced losses after a large earthquake scenario, an integrated software system based on GIS (called GisFFE) was developed to perform a dynamic simulation of FFE. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the details of GisFFE, including its architecture, models and simulation flow, and to present a case study. The architecture of GisFFE consists of 4 components: an urban geo-database, a model library, a simulation center and outputs. The urban geo-database provides basic spatial and statistical data used in the GIS platform for FFE simulation; the model library contains three sub-models (ignition, fire-spread and fire-suppression models), which correspond to the three key stages involved in FFE; the simulation center serves as an operation center that integrates data and models; after the simulation is complete, statistical maps and charts are the resulting output.