The drone-following models in smart cities

Drones are estimated to play a critical role in the smart city, assisting with a variety of use cases: medical, transportation and agriculture. The applications of drones in the smart city will involve multiple drone platforms that operate simultaneously to run missions. Therefore, the safe and secure environment for drones' operational quality and stability is necessary. It is also essential for governments to implement regulations to enforce safe security standards and disallow the implementation of weak cybersecurity measures in live environments. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicted that 30,000 drones could be flying in U.S. skies in less than 20 years.The investigation of the drone traffic safety and development of the intelligent transportation system needs drone-following models, which describes the one-by-one following process of drones in the traffic flow. There are two types of drone-following models that are proposed and discussed in this paper. The first models based on the principle that keeps a safe distance according to relative velocity, which based on the determining of the drone acceleration depending on the differences in speeds and gaps between the given drone and its leading drone. Another model is the Markov drone-following model which is improved model based on the approximation of the stochastic diffusion process of speed decision. The simulation results show that the changes in velocities of the following drones are nearly the same as leading one.