Emergency flood planning and management using unmanned aerial systems

Some 5 million people live in flood risk areas in England and Wales, with one in six homes at risk of flooding. In India, similar risks are present: over 40 million hectares (12% of India's land mass) are prone to flooding and river erosion. In this century, the economic losses resulting from damage caused by flooding far outweigh the costs associated with other natural disasters ($21bn in losses from 27 instances in the UK, and $39bn in losses from 128 instances in India). Furthermore, both the frequency and intensity of pluvial and fluvial flooding is expected to increase over time due to climate change - increasing flood risk, financial loss and (human) fatalities. The UK has well-developed emergency planning processes and procedures, and yet there have been a number of recent cases of flooding where the emergency evacuation process has been stretched to its limits and beyond (e.g. Cockermouth and Carlisle). Earlier this year, the Indian Parliament put forward a national action plan under the Disaster Management Act with the aim of substantially decreasing the loss of life, livelihoods and assets, by improving the country's response to disasters. The plan highlights the urgent need for improved (predictive) warning, risk and threat identification and policy assessment, evacuation planning, data collection, information dissemination, cooperation and effective management of the relief operation. At the heart of the management of these issues is developing a good knowledge of the underlying communities and their infrastructure and the state of these endangered systems at critical times, particularly during the onset and development of the flooding event. The deployment and management of unmanned aerial systems (either vertical take-off and landing quad-rotors or small fixed wing aircraft) and of their data product coupled with advanced model prediction capabilities would seem to be a challenging but promising way of supporting emergency planning and management and testing the predicted and actual effects of policy decisions.

The project focuses on using instrumented unmanned aerial systems (UASs) to collect and collate pertinent information about an unfolding flooding disaster. The relative ease with which UASs can be deployed (often hand launched) to assess damage across large areas provides emergency responders with the opportunity to assess the situation quickly, allowing the prioritisation of resources and their effective deployment where they are required. One aspect of the research will focus on addressing the challenges associated with flying UASs in such (non-ideal) situations: for example maintaining performance during adverse weather conditions, during intermittent loss of communication with the base station, overcoming the loss of operator visuals, providing the ability to recover the vehicle without a runway and avoiding potential collisions with unexpected obstacles within the flight domain.

The project will also consider how the data can be combined with accelerated flood inundation models to generate detailed evacuation plans, and to predict the nature and progress of the flooding to improve allocation of emergency resources, build community flood resilience, save lives and reduce economic damage. The strategy will take into account both the physicality of the flood event itself and the social structures which are subject to the flooding.

The concepts will be practically realised by the creation of a prototype decision support system to allow on-the-ground decision makers in the UK and India emergency coordination teams, or government agencies, to better understand the consequences of flooding to help them make timely and better informed decisions. We will also focus on engaging users and building capacity in India and the UK to integrate the use of UASs effectively into current flood response frameworks in a structured way to maximise the benefits they can provide.

The novel decision support system (DSS) developed through our research will be of direct benefit to flood emergency planners and responders, UAS operators, trainers and educators engaged in tackling emergency situations. It will contribute significantly to socio-economic benefits in terms of: (1) protecting the ability of individuals and industries to carry out economic activity in the face of the rising frequency of flooding, and (2) as an avenue for economic activity based on the goods and services used and developed in the project. The engineering solutions developed will build resilience through preparedness and coping with the onset of flooding, and will build capacity as explicitly envisaged in India's National Disaster Management Plan as discussed in the project proposal.

A project web-site will be set up to showcase the work of the project and will have sections dedicated to the academic community, professional stakeholders and the wider community. Research project reports, stakeholder summaries, publications, and presentations will be made available for download. The usage statistics will be reviewed on a quarterly basis (in terms of number of visits, details on the location from where the web-page has been accessed, number of downloads, etc.) and used to inform and refine the impact management plans. At the end of the project, a lite version of the DSS and key data will be made freely available for the benefit of the scientific and user community. A user-focus report summarising the main findings and implications for practice will also be uploaded.

The capabilities of the UASs and the prototype DSS will be demonstrated to Indian stakeholders to give an understanding of its capabilities and limitations. The DSS will be with integrated with pre, intra and post flooding scenarios and offer the possibility for the system to be used for training and educating purposes.

Four workshops will be held on topics such as: resilience and flood preparedness (UK), application of unmanned aerial systems (India), emergency planning and resource allocation (UK), showcase and demonstration (India). The Indian workshops will be organised by IISc and IIITD and will engage with local officials and other relevant stakeholders in Bangalore, New Delhi and elsewhere. The showcase will be repeated in the UK. In addition a 3-day residential summer school will be run in Exeter for 40 year 12 students. The aim is to inspire and enthuse the next generation of scientists and engineers by introducing them to cutting-edge UAS technologies and a wide range of applications. This will used as a basis to develop their understanding of science, mathematics, and communication skills, and how these can be used to develop exciting technological advances.

Our key industrial partner in India is Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). They are an ideal partner in that they currently provide a Disaster Management Solution with services that include damage prediction and disaster preparation, post disaster work management, consumer communication, analytics and command centres. Currently, this solution does not include integration of UAS data and fast mathematical models with a representation of the underlying physical scenario. Other useful points of contact and collaboration with TCS including system integration, video analytics, UAS customisation and cloud robotics. The project can also strongly benefit from their experience in developing a technology platform that can disseminate crop-related information through mobile phones to farmers. A post-project extension of the DSS could see its application enhanced by facilitating communication of flood related information to communities before, during or after a flood event.

A user-focused report will be written in English and Hindi. This will distil the main findings and implications of the work for practice and will be written in a visually accessible style.