ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces efficient design strategies, stochastic modeling approaches, and the development of fire spread computational models. It discusses the activity paradigm for the design of a large distributed system. Through this paradigm, the modularity aspects and efficiency measures were explicitly articulated. The chapter describes a nonmodular activity tracking model of fire spread. There are three common types of strategy to implement the kernels of discrete-event simulations. These strategies, also called worldviews, consist of: event-scheduling, activity-scanning, and the process-oriented strategy introduced by the Simula language. According to the degree of reusability requested, modularity can be achieved at the modeling and/or simulation levels. Beyond choosing the modularity of a model, the modeler can use a new technique to enhance efficiency: The activity paradigm. Fire spread models are usually categorized into forest and urban fire spread models. Long range spotting is modeled and analytic physics-based equations are used to predict firebrand distances and numbers.
