Α web-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS) platform – named Virtual Fire – for forest fire control has been developed to easily, validly and promptly share and utilize information and tools among firefighting forces.
This state-of-the-art system enables fire management professionals to take advantage of GIS capabilities without
needing to locally install complex software components. Fire management professionals can locate fire service
vehicles and other resources online and in real-time. Fire patrol aircrafts and vehicles may use tracking devices
to send their coordinates directly to the platform. Cameras can augment these data by transmitting images of
high-risk areas into the graphical interface of the system. Furthermore, the system provides the geographical
representation of fire ignition probability and identifies high-risk areas at different local regions daily, based
on a high performance computing (HPC) pilot application that runs on Windows HPC Server. Real-time data
from remote automatic weather stations and weather maps based on a weather forecasting system provide
vital weather data needed for fire prevention and early warning. By using these methods and a variety of fire
management information and tools, the end-users are given the ability to design an operational plan to encom-
pass the forest fire, choosing the best ways to put the fire out within the proper recourses and time.