Improving disaster relief plans for hurricanes with social media

Decisions on humanitarian responses to natural disasters are subject to considerable epistemic uncertainty. This paper advocates for postponing the decision point of pre-positioning relief supplies as close to landfall as possible and searching social media right post-landfall so that the demands can be estimated more accurately. We use a realistic hurricane preparedness case to demonstrate the effectiveness of our models and parametric estimation using social media data. The optimal timing to deploy relief supplies before hurricane landfall is noted to be 12 h in advance, which reduces the total cost by 13% more than if relief supplies are deployed 18+ hours in advance. Meanwhile, utilizing social media information can reduce the total cost as well as all kinds of specific costs being considered, excluding the point of dispensing (POD) sites setup cost, by approximately 15%. As the attitude toward risk goes from optimistic, to neutral, and to pessimistic, the number of PODs increases from 3 to 7, and to 8. A similar pattern can be noted in the total costs incurred by these decision-makers. Further, as the aversion to risk increases, locations tend to be chosen farther from landfall with these farther locations serving the less severe patients.