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

- Expand mathematical formulation to model social media message dissemination.
- Large experimental design using random and real-world (crawled) social media networks.
- Identification of node targeting factors and the impact of planning horizon on factors.
- Node activation in multiple networks is well fitted to logarithmic functions.
- Reliable prediction of best/worst-case outcomes possible using maximum targeting capability.

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.