GIS-based Mission Support System for Wilderness Search and Rescue with Heterogeneous Agents

Coordinating and managing emergency response scenarios in wilderness areas is a difficult task, especially when the search team is distinguished by a wide diversity of sensory-motor and cognitive skills. Moreover, local terrain characteristics and environmental conditions have a strong influence on the performance of the exploration tasks executed by the searchers. To cope with these issues, we present a mission support tool, integrated with geographic information systems (GIS), to assist monitoring and decision-making of mission plans. The proposed framework introduces novel strategies to estimate search efficacy according to agent and environment characteristics, an optimization-based mission planning component which assists the allocation and scheduling of search tasks, and a simulation environment which enables the user to ascertain the outcome of the defined plans.

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