AI Decision Support for Urban Fire Risk Management: A Framework for Validation, Governance, and Bounded Deployment
TL;DR
A role-sensitive framework for bounded deployment of AI decision support in urban fire risk management and a governance logic for keeping exploratory, advisory, policy-shaping, and safety-proximate AI roles separate in urban fire management and policy formulation are developed.
Abstract
AI-based decision support is moving into fire practice and governance, where it is used to prioritise inspections, analyse building and community risk, examine station coverage, support evacuation planning, interpret warnings, and explore fire scenarios. These tools can extend analytical capacity, but they also create a decision role migration problem: an output developed for prediction, prioritisation, warning, simulation, or planning may later be treated as clearance, justification, or authority. Existing fire model evaluation guidance recognises that validation is use-specific; AI systems add a further challenge because outputs can migrate across dashboards, reusable software components, interfaces, and institutional procedures. This article develops a role-sensitive framework for bounded deployment of AI decision support in urban fire risk management. The framework classifies AI outputs by epistemic role, decision proximity, validation basis, temporal coupling, consequence asymmetry, and governance explicitness. Its central synthesis is that evidence sufficient to warn may be insufficient to clear. Probabilistic outputs can support screening, investigation, prioritisation, and scenario analysis; permissive or safety-proximate claims require stronger assurance, uncertainty communication, fallback rules, and explicit authority allocation. The contribution is a governance logic for keeping exploratory, advisory, policy-shaping, and safety-proximate AI roles separate in urban fire management and policy formulation.