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Intelligent Fire Surveillance and State-Space Navigation for Smart Urban Safety: A Hybrid CNN-MLP Framework with A* Guided Emergency Routing

Author(s): Elizabeth J. Burton1
1Warwick Medical School, Coventry, United Kingdom
Elizabeth J. Burton
Warwick Medical School, Coventry, United Kingdom

Abstract

Urban fire response is a core concern in contemporary smart-city development because emergency management depends not only on detection accuracy but also on rapid, reliable routing through complex urban environments. This manuscript presents an integrated fire-surveillance framework that combines visual analytics, environmental sensing, and state-space navigation to support intelligent emergency response. The proposed system uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to analyse fire imagery and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) to process heat and smoke sensor signals, after which an intelligent agent navigates the urban search space using the A* algorithm. The framework is positioned as a practical smart-city safety architecture: it links distributed sensing, machine learning, and graph-based route optimisation in a single operational pipeline.

The empirical design follows the source implementation: the image pipeline is trained on a balanced 1,900-image fire/no-fire collection, supported by a 31-video fire-surveillance set and smoke-sensor data; the navigation stage operates on a custom graph with 297 sensor nodes and 2,345 links. Results reported in the source paper show stable learning behaviour for both CNN and MLP branches, strong classification performance on the held-out image test set, and a consistent operational advantage of A* over heuristic-only best-first routing in weighted state-space navigation. Interpreted for an urban-development and smart-cities audience, the study demonstrates how intelligent surveillance can strengthen public safety, improve response coordination, and support resilient urban infrastructure.

Keywords: smart cities; urban safety; fire surveillance; convolutional neural network; multilayer perceptron; A* search; intelligent agents; emergency routing
Copyright © 2025 Elizabeth J. Burton. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Cite this Article

APA
Burton, E. (2025). Intelligent Fire Surveillance and State-Space Navigation for Smart Urban Safety: A Hybrid CNN-MLP Framework with A* Guided Emergency Routing. Journal of Urban Development and Smart Cities, 2(1), 92-101. https://doi.org/10.66033/judsc2025-209
MLA
Burton, Elizabeth J.. "Intelligent Fire Surveillance and State-Space Navigation for Smart Urban Safety: A Hybrid CNN-MLP Framework with A* Guided Emergency Routing." Journal of Urban Development and Smart Cities, vol. 2, no. 1, 2025, pp. 92-101.
Chicago
Burton, Elizabeth J.. "Intelligent Fire Surveillance and State-Space Navigation for Smart Urban Safety: A Hybrid CNN-MLP Framework with A* Guided Emergency Routing." Journal of Urban Development and Smart Cities 2, no. 1 (2025): 92-101. https://doi.org/10.66033/judsc2025-209
Harvard
Burton, E., 2025. Intelligent Fire Surveillance and State-Space Navigation for Smart Urban Safety: A Hybrid CNN-MLP Framework with A* Guided Emergency Routing. Journal of Urban Development and Smart Cities, 2(1), pp.92-101.
Vancouver
Burton E. Intelligent Fire Surveillance and State-Space Navigation for Smart Urban Safety: A Hybrid CNN-MLP Framework with A* Guided Emergency Routing. Journal of Urban Development and Smart Cities. 2025;2(1):92-101.