Prioritizing Road Network Connectivity Information for Disaster Response

Information plays an important role in disaster response. In the past, there has been a lack of up-to-date information fol-lowing major disasters due to the limited means of commu-nication. This situation has changed substantially in recent years. With the ubiquity of mobile devices, people experi-encing emergency events may still be able to share informa-tion via social media and peer-to-peer networks. Meanwhile, volunteers throughout the world are remotely convened by humanitarian organizations to digitize satellite images for the impacted area. These processes produce rich informa-tion which presents a new challenge for decision makers who have to interpret large amount of heterogeneous information within limited time. This short paper discusses this problem and outlines a potential solution to prioritizing information in emergency situations. Specifically, we focus on informa-tion about road network connectivity, i.e., whether a road segment is still accessible after a disaster. We propose to integrate information value theory with graph theory, and prioritize information items based on their contributions to the successes of potential rescue tasks and to the more ac-curate estimation of road network connectivity. Finally, we point out directions for future work