Drones-as-a-service: A management architecture to provide mission planning, resource brokerage and operation support for fleets of drones

Abstract

Drone operators, institutions (e.g. law enforcement, rescue agencies, preservation organisms, etc.) and companies (logistics, surveillance, inspection, etc.), are constituting themselves as drone operators, at the same time that increase the size of their fleets of drones. Nowadays, each operator independently manages its drones, on service request. Beyond this isolated approach, many operation scenarios would be much better addressed if automated means for coordinated resource allocation and simultaneous drone control were available. In this paper, we describe a microservice-oriented architecture that provides organization and optimization functionalities to orchestrate drone operation. The platform built on the proposed architecture may be used to enable a single operator to optimize the management of its fleet of drones, but also to facilitate coordination of different resources towards a common goal, assuming a drone-as-a-service operation mode. The architecture is validated through a specific use case, for real time allocation of drone resources to enable fast emergency response.