Emxsys
is a software development and consulting business owned by Bruce Schubert.
Emxsys produces the CPS
Wildfire Management Tool (WMT), a free software
application for predicting the fire behavior of wildland fires. WMT
is for firefighters, land managers, homeowners and anyone concerned with
the behavior of a wildfire.
WMT is based on the logic embodied in the Campbell Prediction System (CPS), which is a fireground logic and language system taught to wildland firefighters. In WMT, the CPS logic is coupled with the fire spread equations used in the USFS Behave software to produce an easy-to-use tool for computing and understanding wildland fire behavior.
You can learn more about Bruce on the Contact page.
Wildland firefighters face variations in fire behavior that can be predicable,
but unfortunately, too many firefighters lack the training and knowledge
to foresee these changes, resulting in unsafe or ineffective tactics
that can lead to burnover accidents or the inefficient use of resources.
The Campbell Prediction System has been developed to teach firefighters
how to make predictions of fire behavior changes, which may occur at any
time, and make these predictions while on the fireline. This prediction
system has been field-tested and validated on wildland fires and has prevented
deaths and injuries of fire fighters from burnovers.
The goal is to graphically render the potential fire behaviors relative
to time and space on a 3D terrain viewer, and to generate maps that highlight
potentially dangerous and opportunistic fire behavior situations. The objective
is to collect actual fire behavior observations and analyze them using data
mining and machine learning techniques to determine the potential fire behaviors.
I welcome the feedback from users and I solicit the help of other developers. If you're a user, I'd love to hear from you: please contact me via email, Skype, Twitter, Linked-in or Facebook. If you're a developer interested in this project, please join the emxsys.java.net project.
For wildland firefighters and incident command personnel that
engage in the suppression of wildland fires who need tactical decision
support tools and training systems to ensure the safety of firefighters
and the effective use of firefighting resources, the CPS software
application
is a decision support system and visualization tool that predicts
the potential fire behavior on the fireground based on the Campbell Prediction
System methods; unlike Behave Plus and FARSITE et al,
this system uses on-scene fire behavior observations in addition
to fire behavior calculations to identify both when and where trigger points
and opportunities for control exist on the fireground.
The following context diagram depicts the boundary and connections of the CPS system being developed and everything else in its universe.