On the Provision of Services With UAVs in Disaster Scenarios: A Two‑Stage Stochastic Approach

In this paper, we propose a two-stage stochastic optimization model for the provision services in a multi-tiered network, consisting in user or devices on the ground requiring services to controller UAVs in flight. The requested services are executed by a fleet of pre-existing and additional UAVs. The possible occurrence of disaster scenarios and the related uncertainty and severity could cause an unexpected and sudden increase in demand. Hence, the aim of the proposed model is to optimize the management of the pre-existing and additional resources in order to maximize the total profit of service providers and, simultaneously, minimize the expected loss related to a possible unmet demand. A variational approach is proposed, and some numerical examples are performed to validate the effectiveness of our model.