arXiv subjects

Zhijie Sasha Dong

Publications and source records attributed to Zhijie Sasha Dong.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

A Multi-stage Stochastic Programming Approach for Pre-positioning of Relief Supplies

Pre-positioning of relief supplies is an important aspect of disaster operations management that aims at decreasing the response time by advancing procurement and storage of needed supplies. In this paper we consider commodity life-time period with the related costs in keeping the commodity and removing it from the storage when it is close to expiration (i.e. holding and removal cost). We develop a multi-stage stochastic programming model for pre-positioning of relief supplies, which provides relief agencies insight on how to have dynamically control inventories due to uncertain demands when disasters (e.g., hurricane or earthquake) occur. We also present a case study based on mainland United States to illustrate the proposed model as well as provide managerial insights to relief agencies.

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arXiv2021

Ridesharing Evacuation Model of Disaster Response

Timely evacuation is crucial to disaster response, as people can avoid suffering and loss of lives when a major disaster happens. With the development of sharing economy, ridesharing has the advantage of reducing congestion, saving travel time, and optimizing transportation mode to improve disaster evacuation efficiency. The paper proposes to integrate the concept of ridesharing into evacuation and develops a mixed-integer programming model for this problem. A real-world case study based on Houston is used to validate the proposed model. A series of instances are designed to compare the evacuation efficiency using two indicators, evacuation percentage and average travel distance. Results reveal that increasing the number of vehicles to help carless individuals might not be the most efficient method in this model. Moreover, this model offers a specific response strategy based on different disaster scales, which not only develops a better evacuation plan for the people but also provides relief agencies insights on resource utilization.

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arXiv2021

Social Media Information Sharing for Natural Disaster Response

Social media has become an essential channel for posting disaster-related information, which provide governments and relief agencies real-time data for better disaster management. However, research in this field has not received sufficient attention and extracting useful information is still challenging. This paper aims to improve disaster relief efficiency via mining and analyzing social media data like public attitudes towards disaster response and public demands for targeted relief supplies during different types of disasters. We focus on different natural disasters based on properties such as types, durations, and damages, which contains a total of 41,993 tweets. In this paper, public perception is assessed qualitatively by manually classified tweets, which contain information like the demand for targeted relief supplies, satisfactions of disaster response, and public fear. Public attitudes to natural disasters are studied via a quantitative analysis using eight machine learning models. To better provide decision-makers with the appropriate model, the comparison of machine learning models based on computational time and prediction accuracy is conducted. The change of public opinion during different natural disasters and the evolution of people's behavior of using social media for disaster relief in the face of the identical type of natural disasters as Twitter continues to evolve are studied. The results in this paper demonstrate the feasibility and validation of the proposed research approach and provide relief agencies with insights into better disaster management.

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arXiv2020

Natural Hazards Twitter Dataset

With the development of the Internet, social media has become an important channel for posting disaster-related information. Analyzing attitudes hidden in these texts, known as sentiment analysis, is crucial for the government or relief agencies to improve disaster response efficiency, but it has not received sufficient attention. This paper aims to fill this gap by focusing on investigating attitudes towards disaster response and analyzing targeted relief supplies during disaster response. The contributions of this paper are fourfold. First, we propose several machine learning models for classifying public sentiment concerning disaster-related social media data. Second, we create a natural disaster dataset with sentiment labels, which contains nearly 50,00 Twitter data about different natural disasters in the United States (e.g., a tornado in 2011, a hurricane named Sandy in 2012, a series of floods in 2013, a hurricane named Matthew in 2016, a blizzard in 2016, a hurricane named Harvey in 2017, a hurricane named Michael in 2018, a series of wildfires in 2018, and a hurricane named Dorian in 2019). We are making our dataset available to the research community: https://github.com/Dong-UTIL/Natural-Hazards-Twitter-Dataset. It is our hope that our contribution will enable the study of sentiment analysis in disaster response. Third, we focus on extracting public attitudes and analyzing the essential needs (e.g., food, housing, transportation, and medical supplies) for the public during disaster response, instead of merely targeting on studying positive or negative attitudes of the public to natural disasters. Fourth, we conduct this research from two different dimensions for a comprehensive understanding of public opinion on disaster response, since disparate hazards caused by different types of natural disasters.

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