An Integrated Environmental Decisional Support System Framework using Earth Observation, Cellular Automata and Multi-Agent System

The paper is about the modeling of natural disasters, taking in account both the natural elements than the human behaviors and working on mixed scenarios of forests, build-up area, rivers and roads. We propose a three steps methodology that spans from the earth observation to categorization towards environment forecast modeling and action planning. As case study, we focused on fire spreading. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing tools are used to implement this scenario, while a multi-layer cellular automata is used to model the environment evolution. Finally, a multi-agent system is used to model human behaviors. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method using a case study in a real Italian Region, Sicily. The goal is to employ our integrated approach as standard base in developing a real Decisional Support System to support environmental protection and people life preservation.