This next section describes the potential addition of firefighters into the wildfire model described in section 2.3. While the landscape is acting by its own set of dynamic rules, it is possible that agents acting within the landscape will have a significant impact on the landscape dynamics; in the case of firefighters, influencing the course of the burn is the explicit goal of the agents. The burn itself is a dynamic process that firefighters often refer to in terms of a living thing. While there may be an infinite number of possible ways to stop a fire, the actual containment of the fire is a process that will be severely constrained by the numbers of firefighters, available tools, and their ability to move around the landscape and coordinate with each other. Even with the best conceivable combination of firefighters and equipment, the firefighters are still at the mercy of environmental conditions and random chance. Given all of the disadvantages to the firefighters, the behavior of the burn is still highly influenced by the behavior of the firefighters.
This is not intended to be a detailed discussion of firefighting models. A few basic assumptions will be presented about the firefighting agents, with enough information that the reader will understand how such agents could be added into the cellular model presented earlier. Discussions of how to create ``intelligent'' agents who navigate in a GIS-generated landscape are presented elsewhere in this book, and will not be covered in detail here. The main purpose of the following description is to establish the principles for a dynamic agent/environment interaction model.