About Shodor
Our project represents a Fire-fighter vs Forest fire scenario stemming from lightning striking trees which starts fires. We modelled this scenario with vensimPLE and agent cubes online. By using these two programs we came up with a way to represent this scenario with different variables, a graph, and an interactive simulation that depicts what would likely happen during this event. When looking at the vensim graph our original hypothesis was that one firefighter would be able to put out all the fires but we eventually realized that we would need more firefighters in order to extinguish all of the trees on fire. To make our models realistic we added multiple agents in agent cubes that could accurately depict what would happen during a forest fire for example: firefighters, trees on fire, and burnt trees. For our vensim model we incorporated variables that would have an impact on the amount of trees on fire including: the rate of fire spread, amount of lightning strikes, the number of firefighters, and the rate of fire extinguishing. The vensim model did a good job of providing us with a multitude of independent variables that we could manipulate to hypothesize our end result. Our agent cubes model better simulated our scenario because it provides human error into the story which vensim doesn't account for.