About Emxsys and CPS

WMT:A simplified display of complex dataEmxsys 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.

The Campbell Prediction System

Fireground Logic and Language

Fuel Flammability CurvesWildland 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 Wildfire Management Tool Project

Free Open Source Software

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. 

Vision Statement

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.

Project Scope

The following context diagram depicts the boundary and connections of the CPS system being developed and everything else in its universe.

CPS Context Diagram 

 

Project Stats