A human mobility based knowledge sharing approach for post disaster need assessment using DTN

Abstract

In a post disaster scenario, assessment of resource needs is indeed challenging because needs are constantly changing and supplies trickle in at an uncertain rate. Moreover, information about resource needs of far-flung areas get rarely permeated owing to the disruption of cellular and other communication infrastructure, leading to a huge gap in perception about the actual needs in those areas. Therefore, a dynamic need assessment mechanism is essential to stay abreast of the actual situation. Movements of volunteers and relief workers are governed by two dominant characteristics of human mobility - spatial locality and spatial regularity. In this paper, we make use of such mobility characteristics to propose a knowledge sharing based approach for dynamic assessment of post disaster resource needs using a smart-phone based delay tolerant network (DTN). The proposed technique caters to the objective of bridging the gap in perception about actual resource needs.