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Top1. Introduction
Climate-related catastrophes and wars leave people in dire need of aid. Disasters occur suddenly, cause severe disturbance, inflict pain, and disrupt the lives of a great many people. Disaster relief needs to be agile, quick, and in high volume while being provided through challenging physical conditions (e.g., after a severe flood or earthquake). One of the major drivers of these challenging conditions is the disruption of the usual methods and channels of delivery. In the United States alone, Hurricane Catrina (Scowcroft, 2020), Hurricane Harvey (Hernández, Zezima, and Achenbach, 2017) and Hurricane Maria (Jenkins, 2017), among many others, have shown that even if aid is ready to be delivered, closed roads, broken infrastructure, and depleted human resources prevent immediate relief. Drone technology is promising in providing an alternative to the conventional truck-and-person delivery model. Instead of using roads, drones take advantage of the clear skies. This paradigm shift is proven effective in disaster conditions where the roads are blocked by debris and where there are no roads built due to poverty (Doole, Ellerbroek, and Hoekstra, 2020).
Even if the broken infrastructure challenges are circumvented by the use of drones, another problem relief delivery still suffers from is trust. Many otherwise charitable individuals and organizations may refrain from donating to disaster relief efforts or contributing aid materials, because they are doubtful that the aid will reach the intended parties. What causes such lack of faith is the chaos inherent in a disaster scenario, which renders the typical verification of transactions infeasible. By its nature, blockchain technology is a good candidate to address such trust issues. By providing a distributed platform where no authority can single-handedly decide to rewrite the recorded information, blockchain implementations provide a single source of truth for each stakeholder (Queiroz and Samuel, 2018; Yong, et al., 2020). This is the main advantage of a blockchain based system design over those that use more traditional data storage models such as RDMS and NoSQL.
In this paper, we report on the design of a system that delivers aid supplies through drone technology and records the delivery events into a blockchain in a disastrous hurricane scenario. In this scenario, the flood following the hurricane blocks roads with debris and muddy flood waters. People are trapped in or on their houses in desperate need of emergency supplies such as drinkable water or first aid materials. In such a scenario, both the physical access and trust problems are present, and we address these problems by a unique combination of drone and blockchain technologies. As such, we aim to address the following research questions:
RQ1: How can a framework be developed to guide governments and relief organizations in aid delivery during a disaster when roads are blocked?
RQ2: How can blockchain technology manage the data flow of drone-based delivery processes during aid delivery for disaster relief?
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. A discussion on related work and current research gap are presented in the next section. Details of the problem studied, and our novel solution are presented as well as results from testing the proposed solution through simulations are presented in Section 3. Section 4 discusses the theoretical and practical contributions of the paper, and Section 5 concludes the paper with implications of the work reported herein and directions for future research.