Online scheduling of mobile stations for disaster management

After big disasters, a damaged area can be out of contact because of severe damage of existing network infrastructures. Meanwhile, high demands for network connections to the disaster area will arise to collect damage information and disseminate rescue instructions. In this paper, we propose to construct a network for disaster management using mobile stations equipped with sensors and network interfaces. They are controlled by a disaster management center via wide area network technology, and conduct various disaster management tasks, such as damage sensing, information collection and message dissemination. To address the challenges of unpredictable tasks and limited number of mobile stations with working capability constraints, we propose an online algorithm that schedules mobile stations for disaster management tasks with weights in each time slot, without any knowledge of future task arrivals. Our objective is to maximize the total weight of finished tasks under constraints of maximum working capability of mobile stations. We prove that the performance of proposed online algorithm is no worse than \frac{e-1}{e} of optimal solutions. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate our proposed algorithm.