Some thoughts on disaster management

A new generation of approaches has appeared in the field of disaster management. These serve to improve the awareness of the situation, and to lead the necessary assessment to ensure the collection of quality data, especially under difficult circumstances such as natural disasters. These approaches rely massively on automated gathering of qualified information. To reach this objective, two challenges must be addressed. The first challenge consists of achieving sufficient autonomy, both in terms of navigation and interpretation of the data, which will be turned into technical and scientific advances. The second challenge concerns the reliability of systems (for example, unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs) being implemented from the point of view of the danger they may pose to the environment in which they operate. The design and development of new embedded architectures enable UAVs to be more autonomous, while mitigating the harm they can potentially cause. In this context, modeling, simulation, and various techniques of formal verification are used in order to validate the critical aspects of a platform, to increase its reliability and resilience. However, it is also necessary to take care of non-technical issues. Another consequence of the development of these new approaches is thus their impact on the preservation of privacy, and more generally, legal and administrative concerns. Taking into account aspects that are not normally our scientific and technological areas, such as, for example, the respect for the rights of the victim (privacy), must therefore be carried out jointly with the work of security (safety).