Reactive Search and Rescue Planning

This paper looks at a generic natural disaster scenario where a number of survivors are scattered over a geographical area requiring a coordinated helicopter search and rescue effort. It aims to show that an Empirical Modelling approach to coordinating this is appropriate due to the scenario being dynamic (i.e. reports of new survivors) and changes can be unexpected (e.g. a building collapse requiring some survivors to be high priority) requiring human intervention to the model. Such changes should affect the search and rescue strategy accordingly. The suitability of dependency for affecting these changes is investigated.