New tool for wildfire evacuation simulation receives prestigious award
Enrico Ronchi, Jonathan Wahlqvist, Arthur Rohaert from the Division of Fire Safety Engineering at LTH have been awarded The 2025 Fire Protection Research Foundation Medal together with international colleagues for their work in developing a new tool to simulate fire and evacuation behaviours in connection with wildland fires.
Jonas Andersson – Published 24 June 2025

WUI-NITY: An Industry-Ready WUI Fire Evacuation Model is the name of the simulation platform developed together with researchers from Australia, Canada, the UK and the US.
Congratulations on the award! What is the award and what does it mean to you?
”The NFPA Fire Protection Research Foundation Medal has been awarded to us since at LU we are key players in an International team who has worked for several years on the development of the open-source wildfire evacuation simulation platform called WUI-NITY. This is a fantastic recognition of our team's efforts, as we truly believe in the power of International cooperation and multi-disciplinary science” says Enrico Ronchi, Associate Professor in Evacuation Modelling who developed the platform, together with researcher Jonathan Wahlqvist and PhD student Arthur Rohaert.
You are honoured for your research with a pioneering forest fire evacuation simulator. Can you tell us more about this project?
”It all started with a chat nearly 10 years ago between me and Professor Guillermo Rein at Imperial College London. We realised that most tools available for wildfire safety were either commercial or addressed only part of the problem. They could simulate fire spread or human response during an evacuation scenario. Basically, experts in human factors were not cooperating with those in wildfire simulations.
Therefore, we built over the years a multi-disciplinary team with a mix of academic partners and practitioners through the coordination of the Fire Protection Research Foundation with the goal to develop a multi-physics open-source wildfire evacuation simulator.”
How does this tool work?
”The idea behind the WUI-NITY simulator is a modular tool capable of informing decision making during large-scale evacuations in case of wildfires. To do so, we make simulators from different domains "talk to each other" so that a stakeholder can predict at the same time both the fire evolution and how people would respond. Our tool is backed up by several research studies focusing on collecting and analysing data during wildfire evacuations, e.g. from real-world events as well as through driving simulations.”
Is the tool in operation?
”Yes, the WUI-NITY tool is available for anyone since it is open source. We have already started cooperating with stakeholders around the world interested in applying it.”
It is now summer and there is already talk of forest fires around Europe. Is this something that is of interest in Sweden and Europe?
”Unfortunately, due to climate change and increased urbanisation next to the forest, what were earlier considered sci-fi scenarios with hundreds of thousands of evacuees are now a reality. This has sparked a lot of interest on the topic of wildfire safety in both Sweden (after the 2018 fire season, which was an eye opener for the country) as well as globally.”
NFPA Fire Protection Research Foundation Executive Director Amanda Kimball accepted the award on behalf of the group.
Enrico Ronchi.
WUI-NITY
WUI-NITY has been developed by Lund University, Imperial College London, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and The National Research Council of Canada along with practitioners Movement Strategies and CSIRO/Data61 under the coordination of the Fire Protection Research Foundation.