"A new and powerful tool with which to save lives, property and bushland."
While the 2019/2020 Australian bushfire disaster unfolded, the team at Kablamo sought to find ways we could help by using the skills we had: developing technology to assist firefighters and other emergency personnel.
DEECA Victoria utilised a modelling framework to calculate the likelihood and severity of bushfires. After four years, it needed an injection of cloud technology and machine learning capabilities to continue reducing bushfire risk across the state.
The challenge
The existing prediction platform had bottlenecks preventing scalability. It needed to be accessible to a range of operators — scientists and fire chiefs — who applied the resulting metrics in different and important ways.
The new platform needed cloud-based data storage and processing at many orders of magnitude greater than had previously existed at DEECA. An upgrade like this would not be likely for several years, so the project needed to be as advanced and fit-for-purpose as possible.
The approach
PHOENIX RapidFire puts Australia at the forefront of bushfire tools and analysis innovation.
Kablamo worked with the DEECA team to design and deploy a cloud-native, fully scalable AWS machine learning platform. The solution focused on:
- Scalability — Serverless architecture for near-limitless capacity
- Automation — Automated workflows including post-processing
- Cost-effectiveness — Pay only for what you use
- Performance visibility — Rich operator dashboards
- Bottleneck removal — Eliminated previous processing constraints
The bushfire modelling uses PHOENIX RapidFire — a fire behaviour simulator that puts Australia at the forefront of bushfire tools. To be more accurate, PHOENIX RapidFire was supported with more clean data from geospatial, temporal and historical sources.
Results
A rich user interface was introduced that allowed users to quickly create scenarios for simulation using predefined or newly uploaded data. The team could quickly and easily repeat previous runs with slight modifications.
Looking forward
This redevelopment of an important resource — the ability to predict risk and subsequently manage bushfires — is an absolute milestone in Australia's role as a leader in bushfire management.
With a suite of AWS cloud infrastructure, infinitely scalable data processing, and machine learning advantages, Victoria now has a powerful tool with which to save lives, property and bushland.
Kablamo continues to work with the DEECA team via Product Care services, providing ongoing operational and development support.
