Selection of the Most Proper Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Transportation inEmergency Operations by Using Analytic Hierarchy Process

Abstract

Today rapid development on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technologies continues to evolve and expand its use as a tool that can be used in many fields. The most communal areas for the use of UAV are mapping, assessing, and supporting damage assessments, and search and rescue activities, respectively. However, the application of transporting light and important cargoes that have become widespread recently accessing to the difficult areas is also becoming a new sector in the usage areas of UAV. Lightweight, userfriendly designs of UAVs and flight systems managed by automated workflows giving convenience for this field application. In this study, two different flight platforms (3 fixed-wing and 3 multi-rotor) of flight parameters were evaluated by selecting the sales catalog. Brand knowledge of the UAVs has not given into consideration of the belief that it may adversely affect commercial competition. The sample modeled as a multi-criteria decision-making problem consisting of quantitative and qualitative criteria, and the analytic hierarchy process (AHS), which clearly reveals the decision-makers' views for such problems. Priorities for the criteria of each alternative for the payload, UAV weight, maximum altitude, maximum speed, flight time, and controller range criteria with numerical performance values in order to maintain the consistency problem in the AHS method were figured out by direct assignment. The impact of each criterion in the choice and coherence analysis to determine the effect of each alternative criteria were performed using Expert Choice v2000 software. Because of the analysis made, it is seen that multi-rotor UAVs are the predominant choice for fixed-winged UAVs, among which the UAV_4 flight platform is the most appropriate vehicle for emergency transport with an overall weight of 0.2530. When UAV_4 is compared with other alternative flight platforms, it is seen to be in the foreground according to the criteria of maximum altitude, maximum ground speed, landing field, and ease of use. As seen in the analysis of 2-dimensional alternatives at the end of the example, analysis of UAV to be used in emergency transport according to the landing field and ease of use criteria revealed that multi-rotor UAVs (UAV_4, UAV_5, UAV_6) have more dominant results than fixed-wing UAVs (UAV_1, UAV_2, UAV_3). Although most of the UAV models being developed are still in prototypes, with the rapid development in the field of technology and the industrial knowledge in these applications, further progress can be expected in future projects.