Optimized UAV Placement for Resilient Crisis Communication and Power Grid Restoration

During crises where both communication networks and the electricity grid break down, restoring each individual infrastructure for disaster relief becomes generally infeasible. To tackle this challenge, we propose a disaster management solution using mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) formed by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), offering a promising solution for emergency response. Apart from establishing emergency communications for rescue teams, UAV-enabled MANETs can also enable the formation of electrical microgrids based on distributed energy resources (DER) to locally restore the electric power. We determine the optimal locations and the number of UAVs for this purpose, taking the UAVs’ needs for repeated recharging into account. The problem is formulated on a discrete grid of potential places as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) and solved via an accelerated feasibility query algorithm (FQA). The framework is evaluated for a toy-example and a modified version of the IEEE 123 node test feeder. Simulation results show that compared with conventional MILP approaches, the proposed FQA algorithm can significantly lower the computation times, particularly for large scale MANETs.