A Cooperative UAV-EV Rescue Framework for Post-Disaster Multi-Service Provision

Enhancing the resilience of fundamental infrastructures such as the power system and the communication system are crucial considering the increasingly frequent occurrence of natural disasters. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively discussed as flexible and effective disaster rescue devices for the communication system but their service quantity and quality are severely constrained by their limited battery capacities. In this paper, we leverage the power provision and computing offloading capabilities of electric vehicles (EVs) to help UAVs offload computing tasks and recharge UAVs to prolong their service period. Different from existing literature, the proposed work explores the potential of ground EVs to serve as both power source and computing offloading devices to help extend the operation period of UAVs. Specifically, a cooperative UAV-EV rescue framework is developed to characterize the cooperation procedure of UAV-EV pairs. Then, a two-tier matching problem is formulated where the lower tier maximizes the UAV operation period leveraging EV’s computing and recharging services while the upper tier matches UAVs with EVs considering the optimized UAV operation period and statuses of different outage regions. The matching problem is an integer linear programming problem in nature and can be efficiently solved by CVX. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the cooperative framework on the service utility and UAV operation period extension compared to benchmarks.