The first thing I did was greatly simplify the problem. As stated in the introduction, many factors can change the course of the fire. Even the smallest change in a factor could cause the fire to do something much different. The main factor that I determined through our research to have the largest effect on the fire was the wind. Not only does it determine what general direction the fire will go in, it also determines what intensity and velocity the fire burns at. It therefore also determines how high the flames are, which ultimately decides what sorts of barriers will be need to stop the fire.

The other factor that was determined to be important was terrain. In general, a fire will move up hills and other inclines. If it is stuck at the top of a hill, it will usually burn out. Terrain is harder to model compared to many of the other factors as it involves turning a previously two dimensional perception of the fire’s world and converting it into three dimensions. This was one of the reasons that it was excluded from the preliminary code.

This project does not have any “true” equations but rather has some equations that seem to be somewhat true. There were two reasons I chose to do this. First, extensive field research would have to have been conducted, which I don’t have the resources to do or the time to generate the correct equations. If field research was ever conducted, this method would allow us to replace the current equations with the correct equations. Secondly, many of the models that have been used by certain program that attempt to do some of the things that this project aims at doing involved very high, college level math that I did not have experience in.

Using the method outlined in the previous paragraph, it was easy to determine a starting position for writing our code. Also, after one factor had been modeled into the program, it was simple to add another factor. Each factor is written into its own method, which ultimately can connect up to the driver.

The program was developed using Visual Basic. Due to the programming language’s high visual orientation and the programs necessity of graphical outputs for the user, it appeared and proved to be best to use Visual Basic.

At the time that the final report was due, the program had partially incorporated the wind factors into the large model of the whole project. See the pictures in Appendix A for screenshots of the program.