The use of UAV and geographic information systems for facility location in a post-disaster scenario

Abstract

Abstract Immediately after a natural disaster, several assistance activities are required in the affected areas. The challenges faced in this response phase are numerous, due to the limited availability of resources and the lack of centralized coordination, infrastructure and personnel. The logistical process of these type of operations is initiated with the assessment of the local situation after the emergency alert given by the authorities in the affected country or by the international community, depending on the scale and severity of the disaster or crisis, in a period up to 24 hours after the occurrence of the disaster. This evaluation is fundamental to request the necessary resources to operationalize the response. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is important because it facilitates the speed with which the information is generated and made available to the coordination teams, highlighting the local assessment, the detection of blocked areas and the identification of secondary disasters, which may help increasing logistic efficiency. In this context, the objective of this article is to present a procedure for the decision-making process of structuring the aid distribution network in disaster response operations with the application of UAV technologies and geographic information systems (GIS). The procedure is applied to a real crisis scenario, taking as a basis the characteristics of the post-disaster in the municipality of Duque de Caxias in the state of Rio de Janeiro in 2013. In the end, the results presented with the procedure show that the association between UAV and GIS allows to evaluate the effects of the post-disaster in the affected region to plan and create the operations of attendance.