UAVs Route Planning in Sea Emergencies

We consider the First Boat Rescue (FBR) problem, a new challenging variant of the well-known Electric Vehicle Routing problem. It comes from practical scenarios of rescue activities in the sea. In particular, usually boats relatively close to the coast that require some medical intervention are served by rescue lifeboats, even though most of the times the intervention is unnecessary. As alternative and cheaper approach, here we propose the usage of drones, equipped with basic medical tools that might suffice to solve the request. The main issue is that drones are battery powered and their lifespan is rather short. Hence, recharging activities are required in order to accomplish their missions. To this respect, we exploit a recent development about a charging station composed of a buoy that recharges itself by means of the sea movement and provides a charging pad for a drone. It comes out that by suitably dispose a set of such buoys in the area of interest to be monitored, it is possible to serve many boats alarms by means of drones, without wasting fuel and time for rescue lifeboats. We present a resolution algorithm for FBR along with various simulations concerning random and ad-hoc scenarios.