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After severe natural disasters, being able to communicate is key to effective disaster relief. When survivors are injured and trapped in remote places, for instance, they need to inform rescue workers about their situation in order to get help. The necessary infrastructure can be badly damaged, making the delivery of that information impossible. Even the disaster countermeasures of mobile operators might still leave coverage holes where there is no connection to any cellular network. In this work, we propose the use of Unpiloted Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as data mules to provide means of communication to survivors in those coverage holes. Having a fleet of UAVs, the generation of suitable flight paths is the first step required, followed by their assignment to the UAVs. This problem has been modeled as an integer linear program. Due to the computational complexity, a heuristic solving algorithm is proposed to solve the formulated problem. The optimal and the heuristic solution both have been implemented and evaluated against each other.
Zhong et al. (Mon,) studied this question.