Autonomous Drone Swarm Concept of Operations to Support Wildfire Management

This paper provides an overview of a socio-technical Concept of Operations (ConOps), which can be used in future management of wildfires with the help of a semi-autonomous drone swarm. We developed the ConOps by using qualitative studies that included (1) seven interviews with subject matter experts, (2) a study of the literature, (3) a facilitated workshop led with human factors approaches, and (4) an expert feedback session. Firstly, the results of our paper summarize Finland’s current wildfire management practices. Secondly, they highlight a few of the difficulties that drone usage in such situations faces today and potentially in the future. Thirdly, an overview of the main socio-technical elements of the developed ConOps is presented. The aim of this ConOps is to describe the basic setup of the operation of a drone swarm intended to support situation awareness and help in suppressing a wildfire by fire brigades. Fourthly, the results of a numerical experiment related to the fleet management of a drone swarm are given. Fifthly, a cost-benefit analysis on relevant human factors engineering activities in making this ConOps a reality is presented. Lastly, we discuss the scientific contributions of this study and suggest future research directions for further development and implementation of our ConOps into real-world operations.