# Outside Dynamic Evacuation Routes to Escape a Wildfire: A Prototype App for Forest Firefighters
## 1 Introduction  
Evacuation routes are fundamental ways that indicate the path to be followed when leaving a building, generally to a specific meeting point out of danger to avoid putting people's lives at risk [1]. The implicit hazards of facilities, emergency measures, and safe assembly areas must be considered in the design of evacuation routes [2; 3; 4]. However, these tasks are a bit difficult to implement in wooded environments, i.e., there is no defined route in a wildfire since it changes according to the geographical variations of the terrain, topology, climatic factors, and type of fuel; therefore, safe evacuation routes vary as the incident progresses [5]. Consequently, national and international agencies currently encourage research in creating mechanisms for forecasting, detecting, and monitoring forest fires and educational policies for forest conservation [6; 7]. Meanwhile, technical guides and evacuation plans are offered as consultation tools aimed at communities and field personnel to minimize risks and reduce the mortality rate in these emergencies [8]. Forest fires are a vital and essential process for the natural regulation of the ecosystem. Human action has modified this stability through increasingly aggressive intervention on renewable and non-renewable natural resources [9]. The costs are not only economic. The World Health Organization (WHO) affirms that fire trapping causes the main consequences of mortality from the incident during evacuations and air, nautical, and traffic accidents produced by reduced visibility to the firefighters, rescuers, and civilian population [10; 11]. The risks are always implicit in a fire; for a forest firefighter, these would re-power when they do not have communication with the personnel to locate the fire origin point, not being able to define the spread direction for the creation of firebreaks, or not have well-identified safe areas and escape routes [12]. Planning how to avoid this type of accident is vital, and more so when the fire is directed to populated areas. The firefighters have technological tools that help them mitigate these problems, e.g., mobile computing [13]. However, what ifthe rescuers make a wrong decision based on their analysis? Can the direction the fire takes catch rescuers? These are questions firefighters are faced with in a wildfire, and, depending on the intensity, they could cause severe damage to the environment and human beings. This paper describes a tool for dynamic evacuation routes calculation, which varies considering the terrain's physical characteristics and fire behavior in a forest. Cellular automaton (CA) is implemented to model the spread of a forest fire that uses geographic information (latitude, longitude, and elevation) to calculate the probability that a cell will catch fire and a meteorological API to obtain information on temperature, humidity, and wind speed and direction in real time [14]. In addition, the application uses an algorithm to calculate evacuation routes outdoors [15]; both methods represent previous work of the project, and they have been unified for the creation of this prototype. The tool graphically shows the behavior of the evacuation routes in different fire scenarios and updates depending on the spread. This paper aims to present a way to create a computational tool that allows forest firefighters to be prepared against the eventualities of a wildfire in real time. Furthermore, the tool is designed so that relief agencies can generate control and rescue plans in order to safeguard the lives of human beings. The remainder of this paper is divided into five sections. Section 2 describes the state-of-the-art current technologies involved in emergency management, solutions to forest fires, and this proposal's innovation. Section 3 describes the prototype proposed architecture, the external applications, the mathematical models used to design the virtual sensor network (VSN), and the algorithms' rules for wildfire spread and route evacuation.