Nuclear Accident Emergency Response System: Radiation Field Estimation and Evacuation

Abstract

In this paper, a nuclear accident emergency response system based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and bus collaboration is designed for radiation field estimation and evacuation. When a nuclear accident occurs, the radiation field is estimated firstly using the measurements acquired by UAVs. Based on the Cramer–Rao Lower Bound (CRLB), the coordinate optimization combined with UAV routing is formulated as a nonconvex mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem to maximize the estimation accuracy. Further, a two-stage solution procedure based on genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to solve the above problem. Then, taking the predicted radiation field as input, personnel in the emergency planning zone (EPZ) are evacuated to shelters by buses. The evacuation routing problem for minimizing both the total radiation exposure and evacuation time is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem, which is solvable with efficient commercial solvers, such as Gurobi and CPLEX. The simulation results indicate that the system can provide effective help for emergency management under the nuclear accident scenarios.