Simple model for missAbms course (https://www.agropolis.fr/MISS-ABMS-2023)

The system that we intend to model is a landscape that displays a random pattern with half forested plots and half cleared plots. The area represents 900 Ha of a fire-prone monospecific open forest that is divided in plots of 1 Ha. When a fire breaks out, it spreads around the landscape by setting ablaze in 1 hour all neighboring forested plots. In this landscape, a voluntary forest fire-fighting brigade made of 12 firefighters is monitoring the forest. Each firefighter patrols the forest by moving in 1 hour from one plot to a surrounding plot. If a firefighter detects a burning plot around its location, he/she moves to this plot and extinguishes the fire at this place. If not, he/she moves randomly on one of the surrounding plots.

To assess the extent to which the coordination of firefighters improves the efficiency of the fire-fighting brigade, the possibility to share information among connected firefighters is introduced. Without this possibility, in the reference situation, firefighters act independently: they have no means to know where the other firefighters are located and what they are currently doing. When connected to other firefighters, the location and the status (fighting a fire or patrolling) of each firefighter belonging to a group are known to all group members. In this situation, when a firefighter does not detect any fire around his/her own location, he/she moves towards the closest fire fought by one of the other firefighters of its group if any, else he/she continues patrolling.

The issue we want to tackle with the model is to understand if the number of groups has an effect on the efficiency of the fire-fighting brigade (total area burnt by the fire, time elapsed before fire is extinguished, ...) when initially a fire breaks out in a forested plot randomly picked. So, in addition to the basic scenario, it would be interesting to compare the efficiency of different group sizes: 6 groups of 2 firefighters, 4 groups of 3 firefighters, 3 groups of 4 firefighters, 2 groups of 6 firefighters or a single group of 12.