Abstract
Sustainability is at the heart of many application fields where the use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) is becoming more and more important (e.g., agriculture, fire detection and prediction, environmental surveillance, mapping, etc.). However, their usage and evolution are highly conditioned by the specific application field they are designed for, and thus, they cannot be easily reused among different application fields. From this point of view, being that they are not multipurpose, we can say that they are not fully sustainable. Bearing this in mind, the objective of this paper is two-fold: on the one hand, to identify the whole set of features that must be provided by a UAS to be considered sustainable and to show that there is no UAS satisfying all these features; on the other hand, to present an open and sustainable UAS architecture that may be used to build UAS on demand to provide the features needed in each application field. Since this architecture is mainly based on software and hardware adaptability, it contributes to the technical sustainability of cities.
Highlights
Sustainability has become one of the priority of many public administrations’ and governments’roadmaps
While sustainable software is defined as software, whose direct and indirect negative impacts on the economy, society, human beings and the environment that result from development, deployment and usage of the software are minimal and/or which has a positive effect on sustainable development, sustainable software development is defined as the art of developing sustainable software with a sustainable software engineering process so that negative and positive impacts result in and/or are expected to result from the software product over its whole life cycle and are continuously assessed, documented and used for further optimization of the software [51]
With the aim of evaluating whether the Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) existing on the market are prepared to be used in different application fields, we have conducted a study where we have identified the main features that must be provided by them
Summary
Sustainability has become one of the priority of many public administrations’ and governments’. The main goal of this work is to present an open and sustainable UAS architecture that may be used to build UAS on demand to provide the features needed in each application field. With a smaller fleet of UAS, they can cover a wider set of application fields, saving the costs of acquiring new devices each time or saving costs in maintenance This is aligned with the ideas about sustainability in smart cities presented in [9], where both efficiency in infrastructure and services and reduced costs are mandatory.
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