e-Sanctuary: Open Multi-Physics Framework for Modelling Wildfire Urban Evacuation

The number of evacuees worldwide during wildfire keep rising, year after year. Fire evacuations
at the wildland-urban interfaces (WUI) pose a serious challenge to fire and emergency services
and are a global issue affecting thousands of communities around the world. But to date, there is
a lack of comprehensive tools able to inform, train or aid the evacuation response and the decision
making in case of wildfire. The present work describes a novel framework for modelling wildfire
urban evacuations. The framework is based on multi-physics simulations that can quantify the
evacuation performance. The work argues that an integrated approached requires considering
and integrating all three important components of WUI evacuation, namely: fire spread, pedestrian
movement, and traffic movement. The report includes a systematic review of each model
component, and the key features needed for the integration into a comprehensive toolkit.