Modelling the dynamics of information dissemination under disaster

Abstract Information dissemination has drawn increasing attention of scholars and the government for its importance to disaster response. Understanding the dynamics of information dissemination can help the government disseminate information effectively. Considering people tend to share information with the intimate under disaster, social distance which measures the intimacy between individuals is introduced in this paper. An information dissemination model with preference selection based on social distance is also proposed. Through extensive simulations, we discover the information dissemination process will be suppressed if people prefer disseminating information to individuals with short social distance. In order to facilitate the information dissemination, award to spreaders is found useful for its significant acceleration in dissemination speed. In addition, we examine the efficiency of strategies the government adopts to disseminate information. Comparing to inform-way (q fraction of nodes informed in descending order of H-index), the government is recommended to disseminate information by broadcast-way (all nodes accepting information with a probability λ b ). Our work contributes to understanding the dynamics of information dissemination, and provides the government with suggestions to disseminate information effectively under disaster.