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Premfire™ is a powerful and portable multi-functional command & control decision support system for prevention and mitigation of forest fire hazards. The system comprises key features that greatly enhance the effectiveness of forest fire prevention and fighting actions, providing fire risk assessment and centralized management capabilities for teams in the fire line.
For prevention, Premfire™ uses land cover cartography, satellite images and weather forecasts to generate highly detailed fire-risk maps, which can be used to identify critical areas where fires are likely to occur, so preventive measures can be taken based on this information.
For fire-combat, Premfire™ provides a command & control system that provides information in real-time to the fire-fighters in the field and collects field data to a Command and Control Center for decision support and dissemination to the fire-fighters on the front line.
As forest fires typically occur far from urban centres, three system requirements gain special importance: Mobility, Communications, and Positioning. Premfire™ answers to these requirements by provided to fire-fighters in the field off-the-shelf PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistants) or Tablet PC’s, a wireless communication infrastructure that can use almost any technology in use, and GPS or EGNOS positioning devices.
Premfire™ incorporates a fire-risk assessment tool for daily generation of fire-risk maps. Information is integrated from three main sources: land cover, vegetation stress and weather forecasts. This tool provides an automatic alert generation function, which can provide authorities with preventive alerts based on the fire-risk index.
The Command and Control Center comprises a central repository for all operational and historical data. The Command and Control Center integrates the fire-risk tool, and whenever the system is fed with updated satellite images and meteorological data, the risk-map tool spots high-risk areas, identifies the regional or local fire brigades in charge of those areas, and finally sends out automatic generated alerts based on territorial administrative division or regular grid division.
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