Current Research

  1. Dynamical Data Driven Wildfire Spread and Firefighting Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization, funded by NSF CNS-0540000 (2005-2008), CNS-0720675 (2007-2009). Collaborators: Lewis Ntaimo (Texas A&M), James Nutaro (Oak Ridge National Lab)

  2. Adaptability & Social Behavior for Autonomous Agents, funded by GSU Brain and Behavior Grant, Faculty Mentoring Grant, and P20 Grant. Collaborators: Donald. Edwards (Biology Department), 2004-2007

  3. Progressive Simulation-based Design Framework

 

Research Description

Dynamical Data Driven Wildfire Spread and Firefighting Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization

This research develops an integrated data acquisition, modeling, simulation, and optimization decision support system for effective wildfire management. This system integrates real-time acquisition of weather and fire-front position data, fast simulation of fire spread to predict fire behavior, just in-time optimization to compute firefighting resource deployment, and modeling and simulation of firefighting to assess strategies of fire suppression. Integrating these components that are usually treated in isolation enables a novel comprehensive systems software to effectively support real-time optimal decision making for fire management and minimize firefighting risk and cost. The research involves multidisciplinary team of investigators whose areas of research include discrete event modeling and simulation, stochastic programming, high performance computing, systems software, and wildland fire behavior. The following two figures show two snapshots in wildfire spread simulation and suppression simulation respectively.

               

Figure 1: A fire spread simulation                                                           Figure 2: A firefighting agent in action

 

Adaptability & Social Behavior for Autonomous Agents

This research develops a modeling and simulation environment that enables us to study behavior selection and complex animal behaviors, including learning, changes in behavioral state, and formation of social dominance hierarchies. The research is carried out in the context of crayfish behavior, and is also applied to simulated autonomous agents, and real mobile robots. A simulation environment, BehaviorSim, is being developed (see Figure 1). A mobile robot test bed is set up (see Figure 2). Several projects are under development based on the simulation environment and the robot test bed.

               

    Figure 1: the BehaviorSim environment                                Figure 2: A mobile robot test bed

The BehaviorSim Environment

 

Progressive Simulation-Based Design Framework

Some movies can be found here.

 

Previous Research