Dynamic Truck–UAV Collaboration and Integrated Route Planning for Resilient Urban Emergency Response

Efficient urban emergency response is vital for saving lives and property after disasters. However, urban emergency response is challenging because it involves many demands, with a very tight time for making decisions, and is frequently threatened by the disruption of road networks and infrastructures. Taking these challenges into consideration, this article proposes a dynamic truck-UAV (DTU) collaboration strategy to realize efficient and resilient urban emergency response. Specifically, a DTU collaboration strategy is first proposed based on the characteristics of urban emergency management. Then, an integrated truck-UAV collaborative scheduling model is developed and indicated to be an NP-hard problem. Then, a tabu search-based integrated (TSI) scheduling algorithm is developed, with several tailored local search operators and a recursion-based evaluation (RE) algorithm. Finally, comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed strategy over existing truck-UAV collaboration strategies and verify the performance of our proposed solution algorithm.

In IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management