Multi-network multi-message social media message dissemination problem for emergency communication

Abstract

Abstract Social media has been widely adopted by emergency management organizations and agencies to disseminate emergency messages to the public. However, the traditional one-to-all post-and-wait practice does not serve this purpose well in the complex and dynamic environments in disasters and extreme events. In this paper, we examine an engaged social media node targeting strategy to facilitate message propagation, and propose an optimization scheme incorporating this strategy to determine the optimal sets of nodes to target with planning horizon length, source messaging capacity, social network characteristics and user behaviors considered. Experiments, computational results and managerial insights are discussed.