SCRI Member Prof. HUANG Xinyan proposes novel autonomous firefighting emergency response agent integrating smart fire prediction and LLMs

A research team led by Prof. HUANG Xinyan, Associate Professor of Department of Building Environment and Energy Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), has published a pioneering “LLM-AI” autonomous firefighting emergency response agent framework in Engineering, a flagship journal of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. The study presents a new solution for the future development of smart firefighting.

Powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) as its reasoning and task coordination core, the system integrates the ConvLSTM-Fire prediction model based on artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) technology. To overcome the constraints of manual data handling during emergencies, the system incorporates a self-driven mechanism. It can autonomously translate users’ natural-language requests related to fireground conditions and emergency response needs into executable tasks, generate and execute code, and automatically debug and retry upon encountering errors. This establishes a fully closed-loop workflow spanning data acquisition, model invocation, analytical reasoning, and result visualisation.

Experimental evaluations demonstrate that even under extreme fireground conditions where sensor failures occur, the system maintains a prediction accuracy of over 97% for two-dimensional temperature fields and smoke propagation pathways, exhibiting exceptional robustness. This research advances LLMs beyond conventional “static Q&A” interfaces, transforming them into intelligent firefighting emergency decision-making entities endowed with perception, computation and execution capabilities, thereby enhancing the usability and reliability of smart firefighting technologies in real-world fireground environments. Moving forward, the team aims to incorporate multimodal sensory data, strengthen cross-scenario generalisation capabilities, and accelerate the real-world deployment of this technology in smart buildings and municipal firefighting.

Prof. Huang is currently a member of the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Smart Cities Research Institute (SCRI), the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Research Institute for Smart Energy (RISE), the Research Institute for Sustainable Urban Development (RISUD), and the Research Centre for Resources Engineering towards Carbon Neutrality (RCRE) at PolyU.

Read the full paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809926001244?via%3Dihub

Online coverage:

Sciencenet - https://polyu.me/4yhr5Cj