Joint optimal scheduling for EV-UAV system serving post-disaster rescue

The UAV system is an emerging hi-tech force for emergency response and disaster relief. Electric vehicles (EV) plus unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a novel post-disaster emergency rescue pattern. In an EV-UAV system, the EV acts as a mobile depot to support its mounted UAVs while the UAVs depart from the EV to complete various rescue tasks. And distributed energy sources, e. g., a microgrid and a battery-swapping station, can provide charging services for the EV to enlarge its endurance. A two-echelon framework is presented based on mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) to perform joint optimal scheduling considering constraints such as time windows of demand points, energy endurance and load capacities of UAVs. Case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the model and illustrate the potentials of the proposed system.