WUI-NITY 4 : An Industry-Ready WUI Fire Evacuation Model

In recent years, WUI fire evacuation models have started to be developed. Several now exist, although they are primarily research tools unable to be applied in practice or commercially available tools with limited functionality. For this step – moving from research to practice – such models need to build their credibility through data for their development, testing and application. The WUI-NITY tool has been developed over several previously NIST-funded projects. This project aims at providing a set of useful methods for the development and validation of wildfire evacuation models. This includes social media data mining techniques for the investigation of evacuation behavior and the use of virtual reality technology to explore driving behavior during wildfire scenarios. Those two methods are exemplified through a set of data collection and analysis efforts for which results are made freely available to any interested party. This report also presents the latest enhancements of the WUI-NITY tool and its associated trigger buffer tool K-Peril. This includes the implementation of a microscopic traffic model (SUMO) and the definition of stochastic trigger boundaries. Finally, this report presents information useful for a model user to configure a WUI-NITY simulation through a dedicated user guide. All these activities contribute to the development of a tool that can be used for free by any interested party to investigate wildfire evacuation behavior.