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Academic Editor:Pascal Lorenz
Electronic Engineering Department, University of Seville, Camino de los Descubrimientos, S/N, 41092 Seville, Spain
Received 25 September 2015; Revised 15 January 2016; Accepted 11 February 2016
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
UAVs are envisioned to be used in tactical missions, of either rescue or military nature, that typically involve search for victims or other targets [1-4]. Specifically, in disaster scenarios, emergency crew members that arrive first at the disaster area, also known as first responders, perform rescue tasks against the clock. The reason is that the first 12-24 hours after the disaster occurs is the most critical [5] and consequently a rapid and efficient rescue mission could save an important number of lives or reduce damage. When a group of UAVs is used as a communication network, it usually receives the name of Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANET) [6] or Aerial Ad Hoc Network (AANET) [2] or simply UAV networks [7].
Several works present mobility models for victims and first responders in disaster areas [8, 9]. These works not only model the incident site, which is the region where the disaster actually occurred. They also model other regions such as patient's treatment area, transport area, and others. These mobility models are focused mainly on the transport of patients from the incident site to other regions but do not model in detail the incident site. Victims' movements within the incident site usually are modelled by using the random waypoint mobility model [10, 11]. We propose a more complete and detailed victims' mobility model for the incident site, which is composed of different elements found in urban disaster scenarios, such as roads, buildings, wreckage, and others. The proposed victims' mobility model in this paper specifically focuses on urban scenarios. The proposed mobility model for victims will serve us for simulating a FANET self-deployment based on the Jaccard distance and artificial intelligence algorithms.
In disaster scenarios and specifically in the incident site, UAVs networks can be of paramount help for victims and crew members involved in rescue operations. FANET could provide different types of services to victims and...