ABSTRACT
The casualties and infrastructure damage caused by natural disasters necessitate efficient disaster management. The era of fast-paced development in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) technology and their use in various domains have opened a new paradigm on their use in natural disaster management. In this paper, a two-stage operational lifecycle for flood management using UAVs is envisaged. First, the pre-disaster preparedness, concerning surveying-related events that precede the flood, setting up Early Warning Systems (EWS), and requirements of UAVs for rapid and efficient deployment during the flood, is decided. Next, the damage assessment phase, which provides post-disaster logistics planning to initiate the reconstruction of infrastructure, is executed. Each stage with varying priority levels lasts for a different time span and imposes a different set of task demands on the UAVs. Our present work focuses on the detailed study of how UAVs can be deployed in these two phases of flood management in the Indian context.
