FireGrid Project

Note that the original project consortium web site at http://firegrid.org is no longer active.
But the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has snapshots of the site and contents when it was active up to 2016.

FireGrid Consortium

The FireGrid consortium brought together many bodies with an interest in improving response to fire emergencies. It was led by the School of Engineering and Electronics at the University of Edinburgh. Members included:

Emergency Planning and Response organisations (Fire Brigades and the Fire Research Division of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister)
Engineering & Technology Consultancy Companies (Arup and Building Research Establishment (BRE))
Computational Software and Sensing Technology Companies (Vision Systems, ABAQUS, ANSYS)
National Research Laboratories (NeSC, NIST, IRSN, TNO, HSL)
Universities and Colleges (Edinburgh, Imperial, Queen Mary, The Fire Service College, IHPC Singapore)

FireGrid Project Overview

The FireGrid consortium was a multidisciplinary collaboration investigating next-generation emergency response systems.

The FireGrid project aimed to harness the potential of advanced forms of computation to support the response to large-scale fire emergencies. The challenges were:

Sensing: Data collection from the emergency location with instantaneous and continuous relay to the emergency response system (involving a large array of sensors communicating with each other as a network and with the response system via the Grid);
Modelling: Simulation tools running in a predictive mode to model the evolution of the fire, establish its impact on the structure (and therefore predict the collapse), while also analysing the intervention alternatives and evacuation strategies;
Forecast: All simulations, analyses and communications to be achieved faster than the evolution of the emergency in real time;
Feedback: Processing of the continuously updated sensor and simulation data relayed back to the active response systems at the emergency location and to the emergency services to assist their intervention;
Response: Effective co-ordination of all intervention by a command and control system using an intelligent execution support aid.

At the University of Edinburgh, AIAI's role was to provide expertise on the intelligent command and control user interface to present useful and actionable information to the emergency response coordinator. EPCC's role was to provide expertise on high-performance computing for simulation and modelling. Computational models of physical phenomena were developed, deployed and analysed on High Performance Computing resources to infer incident conditions by assimilating live sensor data from an emergency in real time - or, in the case of predictive models, faster-than-real time. The results of these models are then interpreted by a knowledge-based reasoning scheme to provide support information for the emergency responder. These models are accessed over a Grid from an agent-based system.

Other information:

Papers on FireGrid
Han, L., Potter, S., Beckett, G., Pringle, G., Welch, S., Koo, S-H., Wickler, G., Usmani, A., Torero, J. and Tate, A. (2010) FireGrid: An e-Infrastructure for Next-Generation Emergency Response Support, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 70 (2010) 1128-1141. [URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1842/3988] [PDF Format]
EPCC FireGrid Project Page: FireGRID: HPC for fire emergency response systems, EPCC, University of Edinburgh
BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering FireGrid Project Page: FireGrid - An Integrated Emergency Response System, John Holden, BRE Principal Consultant
BBC TV - Horizon - Aired: 24 April, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Book - The Dalmarnock Fire Tests: Experiments and Modelling - Paperback 1-Nov-2007 [Front Cover, Back Cover]

Acknowledgements

The FireGrid project was co-funded by the UK Technology Strategy Board's Collaborative Research and Development programme, following an open competition. The authors acknowledge the contribution of all colleagues in the FireGrid project. This work made use of the facilities of HPCx, the UK's national high-performance computing service, which is provided by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and by STFC Daresbury Laboratory, and funded by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills through EPSRC's High End Computing Programme.

Note that the original project consortium web site at http://firegrid.org is no longer active. But the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has snapshots of the site and contents when it was active up to 2016.