Abstract:

Despite the damage caused by the forest fires no visible attempts have been taken by the respective government authorities in Sri Lanka, to reduce the destruction caused by forest fires. The objective of this study is to identify the drawbacks of the existing forest fire controlling procedure in Sri Lanka and to propose an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based solution to improve the identified short comings. By following the design science research methodology, this research will present a framework for dynamic resource allocation during a forest fire situation. After reviewing the existing ICT approaches available for dynamic resource allocation during disasters and their applicability for Sri Lankan context, the overall architecture of the system is proposed. Together with three sub modules the system tracks the available resources, predicts the forest fire burnt area and finally allocates the resources based on the estimation. This study reveals that the government of Sri Lanka as well as the citizens could benefit by adopting ICT based solutions to handle forest fires. Based on the evaluations carried out, future work is also presented.