AEGIS

aegisWithing AEGIS project we developed a Web GIS wildfire prevention and management platform aiming at reducing the potential human, environmental and property losses. AEGIS is to contribute in the area of forest fire management by providing access to a large number of information and services. The platform has been developed and applied in 7 different study locations spread out all over Greece with high-hazard, high-value and high-use forest and other multi-purpose areas.

This research project was implemented within the framework of the Action “ARISTEIA” of the Operational Program “Education and Lifelong Learning” (Action’s Beneficiary: General Secretariat for Research and Technology), and is co-financed by the European Social Fund and the Greek State. The duration of the project was 3 years (Sept. 2012 – Sept. 2015).

My personal involvement in the project was to develop the fire danger rating system for all the study areas. I used Artificial Neural Networks for the calculation of a wildfire ignition probability index by using MATLAB. The wildfire ignition probability index was merged with the expected wildfire flame length in order to calculate the overall fire danger index. The code for the daily calculation was developed by using the trained nets of MATLAB, ESRI’s arcpy scripts, Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft HPC technology running in our datacenter. The same HPC job was also used  for the preparation of the hourly weather forecasting maps based on weather forecasting data provided by SKIRON’s model.

Dissemination and Exploitation activities

At the end of the project, the video below was produced in order to present the overall progress and the results of the AEGIS.

In November 2015, AEGIS was invited by Microsoft to participate in the Smart City Expo in Barcelona, Spain. Therefore,  AEGIS was one of the 42 MS partners in Microsoft’s booth. Hundreds of visitors explored our demo platform showing quite interest in a possible exploitation of AEGIS to their countries.