CITE - Indexed Articles in Conferences

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Browsing CITE - Indexed Articles in Conferences by Author "Abilio Pereira Pacheco"
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    Rekindle dynamics: validating the pressure on wildland fire suppression resources and implications for fire management in Portugal.
    ( 2012) João Claro ; Abilio Pereira Pacheco ; Tiago Oliveira
    Rekindles can represent a high burden on wildland fire suppression resources, but despite the relevance of this phenomenon in Portugal, related research is still scarce. Seeking to contribute to address this gap, the purpose of this study was to organize and provide an overview of the problem of rekindles in Portugal, and to verify whether evidence exists that the high proportion of rekindles in Portugal is related to the double duty of Portuguese firefighters to perform initial attack and mop-up operations. Our study included informal meetings, formal recorded interviews, dispatch centre visits, actual rekindle observation, and an analysis of the National Forest Authority database. From the study of genealogies of rekindles, we concluded that 17.2% additional forest fires (rekindles in successive generations) had their origin in only 7.4% of primary fires. Through linear regression analysis, we found that their proportions increase in days with more occurrences, preliminarily sup
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    Simulation analysis of a wildfire suppression system
    ( 2012) Tiago Oliveira ; Abilio Pereira Pacheco ; João Claro
    Rekindles and false alarms are unusually high in the Portuguese wildfire management system, representing a high burden on suppression resources in particular, and fire management resources in general. In 20,049 occurrences that the suppression system handled in the summer of 2010, 12.5% were false alarms and 15.0% were rekindles. We present a discrete-event simulation model of a wildfire suppression system, designed to analyze the joint impact of primary fires, rekindles and false alarms on system performance. The work contributes to fill a research gap concerning that impact, and features a novel application of simulation to suppression systems, as screening tools to support more holistic analyses. The model was implemented in ®ARENA, and used for a study of a Portuguese district. We found that reducing false alarms and rekindles to benchmark values would significantly reduce pressure on firefighting teams, enabling more effective suppression operations.