| (in English) |
In the event of a disaster, it is crucial to assess the damage over large areas and to guide the evacuation of victims as quickly and efficiently as possible. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for this purpose has attracted attention. However, the maximum flight time of the UAVs used in many existing studies is around 30 minutes, making them unsuitable for long-duration, wide-area operations. In addition, most UAVs are designed to collect disaster information from sensor equipment installed on the ground, and do not take into account damage to sensor equipment. To solve these problems, the authors proposed a system in which a large gasoline-powered UAV is equipped with a small UAV to search for disaster victims, and when evacuees are found, the small UAV is separated from the large UAV to provide evacuation guidance by the small UAV. However, since the base station (BS) for loading the small UAV onto the large UAV and charging the UAV was located at the evacuation site, the large UAV had to go to the evacuation site every time the small UAV was separated from the large UAV, and the impact on the evacuation completion time due to the movement of the large UAV was not evaluated. Therefore, this paper aims to reduce the overall evacuation completion time by optimising the location of the BSs. We propose a deployment design method to minimise the travel distance of the large UAVs as they approach the BS. We also use simulations to analyse the effectiveness of the proposed method when the location of BSs, the number of BSs, and the number of small UAVs deployed per BS are changed. As a future research plan, we describe how to design search routes for disaster victims for large UAVs based on the priority level calculated from the hazard level and population distribution for each disaster. |