A Utility Driven Post Disaster Emergency Resource Allocation System Using DTN

Abstract

Two of the most dominant challenges in post disaster emergency resource allocation are: 1) understanding the exact utility, i.e., exigency, of emergency resources and 2) collecting and transmitting the need for these resources to the control station from where resources are allocated. Measuring the utility of resources with precision becomes tricky in a dynamic post disaster scenario, where demands are constantly evolving and supplies trickle in at an uncertain rate. Moreover, collection and transmission of resource needs of far-flung areas are easier said than done owing to the post disaster disruption of communication infrastructure. These result in the ad-hoc allocation of emergency resources to the shelters. In this paper, we first derive a utility function for dynamically enumerating the shelter specific utility of each emergency resource. Subsequently, we propose an opportunistic knowledge sharing scheme for gathering and disseminating resource needs to the control station using a smartphone-based delay tolerant network. Finally, based on these opportunistically transmitted needs, we formulate a utility driven optimal resource allocation model which minimizes overall resource deficit and total resource deployment time. The proposed system optimally assigns constrained emergency resources to different shelters, so that high-utility resources are deployed fast. The effectiveness of the proposed system is evaluated using ONE simulator and LINGO optimization modeling tool. Exhaustive simulation is done to evaluate the comparative performance of our system with a number of competing schemes. Results show that our system outperforms all these schemes in a fully connected scenario. It is also observed that even in an intermittently connected environment, the performance of our system is almost at par with the competing schemes.