Modeling command and control systems in wildfire management: characterization of and design for resiliency

From national defense to critical infrastructure, many sectors of modern society depend on complex command and control (C2) systems. In the context of wildfire management, C2 systems also represent the core capabilities of combating fire at tactical, operational, and strategic levels. There are various disruptions to C2 system functioning due to natural forces or human actions, most of which are difficult to predict. Therefore, the resilience of a C2 system, i.e., the ability to avoid, mitigate, survive, and recover from disruptions, is essential. However, there have been few studies on the systems dynamic modeling of C2 systems and even fewer quantitative methods to evaluate their resilience. This work develops a dynamic modeling approach to measure the C2 system resilience for wildfire management. The simulation framework consists of complex networks, cascading failures, and self-healing. A new method characterizing the recovery trajectory is applied. This work presents the preliminary results on the resilience of C2 systems under difference network topologies, cascading failure modes, and self-healing mechanisms. The developed model could help decision-makers in wildland fire management identify and quantify C2 resilience metrics, discover vulnerabilities and most critical elements in existing networks, generate lessons learned from historical records, and conduct what-if analyses to evaluate different resilience enhancing proposals at planning and operation stages.