Smart Forest Fire Alarm system (LoRaWAN)

Due to climate change, we are increasingly confronted with extreme weather conditions. The most striking event is the bush fires that we see in Australia where thousands of acres of forests are lost and more than a billion animals got killed. The economic damage of this catastrophe is immense. According to fire services in New South Wales more than 1.588 houses are lost and 653 are heavily damaged by the fires. In the state of Victoria, another 450 buildings are lost. The total damage is estimated at 700 million Australian dollars, around 430 million euros (Belga, 2020).
The excessive drought is also felt in Europe and the Netherlands, where the summers of 2018 and 2019 are characterized by very dry periods. Even in the Netherlands big fires occur like the fire in the Loonse and Drunense Duinen where 3 pockets of fire had to be extinguished (Meer, Cleven, & Harthoorn, 2020). This makes cities in and near forests think about the consequences for citizens and the local economy in the case of a fire that jeopardizes their towns.
What would happen if a barbeque ignites the forest near Apeldoorn? How to respond when tourist attractions like Juliana Toren or Apenheul have to be evacuated? What will be the economic damage when Paleis Het Loo is burned down and the tourist industry comes to a halt in the Veluwe area?
For cities like Apeldoorn, Harderwijk, Elspeet, and Tilburg early warning and detection system can be a game-changer in solving the problem of forest fires.

Therefore, we have been asked to form team that will develop SFFA (Smart Forest Fire Alarm system). SFFA will be a large number of nodes installed in a forest or target area, a server application where the sensor data will be sent to and an user application on which the user can see the state of the forest and where fire warnings will be received.

The main features of the SFFA are listed below:

• Determine the seriousness of a fire hazard, or the state in which the forest is.
• Detect forest fire as an early warning system
• Monitor health of the deployed node.
• Presenting information on a server.