Construction Of A Temporary Message Collection System Using A Drone For Refugees In A Large-Scale Disaster

When a large-scale disaster happens, which causes catastrophic damage to terrestrial information/road traffic networks and forces a huge number of people to live as refugees in shelters, it is necessary to quickly check the safety of victims and damage state in the disaster-hit area. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) including drones are promised to play an essential role in such a disaster recovery process because of its infrastructureless workability.In this paper, we propose a message collection system using a drone for refugees in a disaster-hit area. In order to quickly and efficiently collect messages for all refugees dispersed in shelters, we try to solve a problem to create a flight plan in the form of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), taking into consideration two major drawbacks of drone such as short time to fly and vulnerability to wind. Our numerical results for an area of Osaka, Japan, show that off-line pre-creation of drone routes assuming no wind is risky, because the drone cannot safely return to a depot, if it is used under some windy conditions.