UAVs Missions for Sea Emergencies

This paper presents the First Boat Rescue (FBR) problem, a new challenging variant of the well-known Electric Vehicle Routing problem. FBR stems from practical rescue operations where a rescue lifeboat and its medical team provide assistance to a boat close to the coast. Quite often the boat calls for unnecessary assistance which leads to a waste of resources. As an alternative and cheaper approach, this paper proposes the use of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with basic medical tools. More precisely, a lifeboat departure can be avoided when the UAV reaches the boat and remotely connects to the medical team which, by using the UAV’s medical tools, deems the assistance unneeded. UAVs are battery powered which may require recharging activities to accomplish the rescue operations. A buoy recharging station that uses the sea movement and provides a charging pad for a UAV can be used. When buoys are suitably disposed in the rescuing area, a UAV can assist multiple boats in need of emergency without wasting rescue lifeboat fuel and unnecessarily occupying the time of the medical team. This paper studies FBR in two scenarios with partial and full battery recharging policies and presents the Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulations of the problems. For FBR in the partial recharging scenario, the paper proposes two heuristics. The paper also proves that there is an algorithm that approximates FBR with full recharging policy. The paper concludes by describing various simulations and evaluates the proposed algorithms on random and ad-hoc instances.