Abstract
This paper presents a post-earthquake response system for a rapid damage assessment. In this system, multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are deployed to collect the images from the earthquake site and create a response map for extracting useful information. It is an extension of well-known coverage path problem (CPP) that is based on the grid pattern map decomposition. In addition to some linear strengthening techniques, two mathematic formulations, 4-index and 5-index models, are proposed in the approach and coded in GAMS (Cplex solver). They are tested on a number of problems and the results show that the 5-index model outperforms the 4-index model. Moreover, the proposed system could be significantly improved by the solver-generated cuts, additional constraints, and the variable branching priority extensions.
Highlights
Rapid damage assessment in post-earthquake situations plays an important role in the early response phase activities
The satellite systems have many limitations for an efficient post-disaster imaging, such as weather conditions, time constraints for acquiring images and uplinking the acquisition plan to the satellite, delay in satellite data delivery after collection, etc. [9,10]; much attention has been focused on utilizing small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for post-disaster mapping [11,12,13]
Each test instance was named in the X-Y-Z-L format, where X refers to the total number of squares in the map, Y refers to the total number of residential squares, Z represents the number of potential UAV bases, and L is the number of available UAVs
Summary
Rapid damage assessment in post-earthquake situations plays an important role in the early response phase activities (i.e., evacuation of injured individuals, debris collection, and relief distribution). The ground-based post-earthquake inspection is extremely time-consuming, and unhelpful in severely damaged areas; at present, aerial systems are widely used for investigations. It is highly desirable for densely populated urban areas to have a pre-planned immediate and automated post-disaster mapping and monitoring system. [9,10]; much attention has been focused on utilizing small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for post-disaster mapping [11,12,13]. UAVs have become a popular entertaining tool globally. UAVs of various sizes are available on the market that can carry film or photographic cameras for different applications
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