Intelligent fire modeling in wildland-urban interface: A comprehensive review of current progress, challenges, and future perspectives

Wildfire prevention and control, especially within complex Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), face escalating challenges due to the synergistic impacts of climate change and expanding urban frontiers. While advanced wildfire spread prediction models are essential for developing disaster-resilient emergency systems, the increasing complexities of WUI wildfire scenarios highlight critical limitations in current modeling approaches. These complexities include the dynamic interactions between vegetation and built environments, the demands of multi-scale spatiotemporal forecasting, and the challenges of cross-platform integration. To better understand and address these challenges, this paper establishes a novel tripartite analytical framework through a systematic review of peer-reviewed studies from the Scopus and Web of Science databases: (1) fire combustion characterization, (2) fire dynamics mechanism, and (3) fire management system. Our critical analysis identifies three persistent research challenges, including modeling fire behaviors in heterogeneous WUI scenarios; balancing fire dynamics with computational speed, accuracy, and resolution; and managing and applying models in highly integrated systems. This study concludes with actionable priorities for subsequent research, providing methodological guidelines for model developers and evidence-based integration pathways for emergency management systems, particularly in addressing critical infrastructure protection in rapidly urbanizing, fire-prone regions.