An Ethical Framework for Message Prioritization in Disaster Response

Abstract

Disaster response robots show promise, but risk adding significant load to already overburdened communication networks. Previous work addressed this problem by prioritizing certain messages; however, the ethical implications of message prioritization in disaster response have not been studied comprehensively. This manuscript proposes an ethical framework for evaluating message prioritization mechanisms. Additionally, a taxonomy of the existing message prioritization approaches is introduced, highlighting the ethical principles that most require further study for each approach.