Improving Resilience Using Drones for Effective Monitoring after Disruptive Events

Abstract

We observe a world of increasing anxiety due to natural and man-made disasters, pandemics, and military conflicts. Such disruptive events lead to decreased infrastructure and personnel availability; still, infrastructure and personnel are essential for keeping society running, and for addressing the effects of disruptions. We argue that drone technology could provide monitoring/logistics services that can help in addressing such needs. This paper focuses on the monitoring function which can provide situational awareness to decision makers after such a crisis. Drones are less dependent on nearby area infrastructure and can observe affected regions from above. Those are key advantages compared to other solutions. Still, drones are dependent on communication services and ground operators. Therefore, we need drone solutions that are less dependent on the availability of local infrastructure and people. Several conceptual solutions to reach this independence, based on recent developments in drone technology, are explicitly discussed in the current paper and confronted with the requirements and boundary conditions posed by disruptive events. Validating such solutions in real emergency situations is left for future work.