Selection of Take-Off and Landing Sites for Firefighter Drones in Urban Areas Using a GIS-Based Multi-Criteria Model

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This an interesting and clearly written article.

Please see the recommendations and questions in the attached pdf document.

Some minor changes need to be made, like editing some maps and text formatting.

 

On the other hand, more detailed explanation about the selection of indicators should be included.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear, Reviewer1

Thank you for your valuable comments so that our paper can be developed. We reflected all the opinions of the reviewers in the paper. The revisions of the paper are as follows.

 

Q1. (Line 128) To do soi,

A1. It has been modified as follows. "To do so,"

 

Q2. (line 193) why only those 7?, "We selected”mean that there are other criteria that could be used? Why they were ignored?

A2. Thank you for your valuable comments. Our study is a basic study on location selection for take-off and landing sites for firefighting drone use in urban areas. Of course, there may be various criteria other than the 7 criteria. However, there are almost no studies on site selection criteria. And there are limitations in developing and applying all criteria in this study. We believe that this study is meaningful in providing a methodology for site selection for take-off and landing sites of fire drones. We plan to carry out additional research to select the criteria for take-off and landing sites of fire drones through additional research in the future. Thank you for your valuable comments.

 

Q3. (Line 346, Figure 4) figure 4 must be changed. It is impossible to understand which are research target buildings.

A3. Figure 4 has been modified based on your comments.

 

Q4. (Line 370) Insert a newline before

A4. It has been modified

 

Q5. (line 429) Problem with legend

A5. It has been modified

 

Q6. How this "relaxation” was performed?

A6. In this study, take-off and landing sites were selected based on seven criteria. In addition, the 318 selected buildings were grouped based on their geographic location, and the centrally located building was selected using the Central Feature tool among GIS tools. However, in the case of the selected building, there is a problem in that it is difficult to respond to a building with a fire in the past located on the west side of the target site. In order to solve this problem, among the public buildings that are judged to have smooth work cooperation with the fire department, additional buildings that meet 6 or more criteria were selected. As the criteria were relaxed, two public buildings were additionally selected, and six criteria were met and one criterion (number of floors) was not met. In the future, we plan to conduct additional research on the selection and application methodology of mitigation criteria.

 

Q7. (Line487, Figure 9 and Line 488, Figure 10) Buildings on Target Site are nearly impossible to identify.

A7. We modified the location of the building layer to make it easier to identify.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

excellent work!

Author Response

Dear, Reviewer2

Thank you for your comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The focus of the work is certainly useful but not very original.These issues have already been addressed in similar contexts and in more complicated and it can be referred to:

Mangiameli M, Muscato G, Mussumeci G, Milazzo C (2013). A GIS

 application for UAV flight planning. In IFAC Proceedings Volumes, Volume

46, Issue 30, 2013, Pages 147-151 ; doi: 10.3182/20131120-3-FR-4045.00025. 

The developed GIS application is trivial and wrongly designed.

The topography used is not explained, how the information on the buildings is obtained, there is no data structure behind it all.

Everything to be reviewed and better explained

 

 

 

Author Response

Dear, Reviewer 3

Thank you for your valuable comments so that our paper can be developed. We reflected all the opinions of the reviewers in the paper. The revisions of the paper are as follows.

 

Q1. The developed GIS application is trivial and wrongly designed.

A1. Thank you for the attached references and good comments. Our study is a basic study on location selection for take-off and landing sites for firefighting drone use in urban areas. In the case of urban areas where various obstacles coexist, many factors must be considered. Considering this, in this study, a flight plan was made by taking off the aircraft to a certain height, moving to the fire site, and descending the aircraft. As such, this study focused on location selection, and it is difficult to consider all the flight factors of the aircraft that are affected by various obstacles in the downtown area. Line 173 of Papper 3.1 Flight plan of firefighter drones supplemented the flight plan. We also added more content to Discussion and Conclusions (Line 520).

 

Q2. The topography used is not explained, how the information on the buildings is obtained, there is no data structure behind it all.

A2. The data used in this study is provided by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport of the Republic of Korea and is mentioned in Line 324, and the structure of the data was supplemented and modified in Line 326. Thank you for your valuable comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx