Mobility Pattern Analysis for Power Restoration Activities Using Geo-Tagged Tweets

Conference · Fri Nov 01 00:00:00 EDT 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3356395.3365547· OSTI ID:1665973

Kar, Bandana  ^[1]; Ethridge, Jacob ^[2]

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1. ORNL
2. University of Tennessee, Chattanooga (UTC)

In this study, we analyzed mobility patterns of at-risk populations affected by an extreme event using geotagged tweets to geo-target power restoration efforts. Unlike other studies that have used tweets to facilitate emergency management activities, we used 1.5 million geotagged tweets generated during Hurricane Sandy (2012) to determine the mobility patterns and geospatial distribution of impacted populations who experienced power outage before, during and after the hurricane. We implemented a three-step analytical framework to: (i) analyze tweet contents with visual methods, including dendrograms, word clouds to identify common keywords pertaining to power outage; (ii) identify target users whose tweets contained information about power outages; and (iii) create a user-tweet locations matrix and an origin-destination matrix to examine clusters of target users and their mobility patterns. Preliminary results indicate that potential clusters were present in and around New York city, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and Baltimore, which were used as potential evacuation destination cities after hurricane Sandy. The travel pattern and destination information can be used to (i) mobilize restoration efforts by utility companies and (ii) address resource allocation needs both in impacted and destination cities. Future work will focus on analyzing potential destinations for different origins and travel-time to identify evacuation routing patterns.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1665973
• Resource Relation: Conference: 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Advancements in Resilient and Intelligent Cities - Chicago, Illinois, United States of America - 11/5/2019 5:00:00 AM-
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English