Resource delivery path dependent deployment scheduling for contingency cellular network

When a catastrophic natural disaster occurs, the efficiency of disaster response is crucial to life saving. However, mobile communication systems usually crashed due to various causes, making the coordination among a large number of disorganized disaster response workers extremely difficult. We propose a Contingency Cellular Network (CCN) by connecting disconnected base stations together with wireless links and portable power generators. Since the transportation capacity may be very limited, scheduling of CCN deployment order according to the demand of disaster response becomes an important issue. Two models aiming to maximize disaster response efficiency are proposed in this research. Emergency levels of disaster areas, time decreasing profit functions, traveling time of delivery path, and antecessor precedence constraint are taken into consideration in the CCNDS-AC model. The second model, CCNDS-UC is the same but with antecessor precedence constraint relaxed. Both problems are proven NP complete. Two heuristic but efficient algorithms are designed to solve the problems. Both algorithms can outperform our previous algorithm by a significant margin in our simulation experiments. This shows that the traveling time is a significant factor in designing an effective CCN deployment scheduling problem.