Cover: Exploring the Effect of the Diffusion of Geo-Targeted Emergency Alerts

Exploring the Effect of the Diffusion of Geo-Targeted Emergency Alerts

The Application of Agent-Based Modeling to Understanding the Spread of Messages from the Wireless Emergency Alerts System

Published in: Exploring the Effect of the Diffusion of Geo-Targeted Emergency Alerts: The Application of Agent-Based Modeling to Understanding the Spread of Messages from the Wireless Emergency Alerts System (Washington, D.C.: Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology, July 2015)

Posted on RAND.org on November 23, 2015

by Andrew M. Parker, Brian A. Jackson, Angel R. Martinez, Ricardo Sanchez, Shoshana R. Shelton, Jan Osburg

This report answers three main questions 1) how does the interaction of geo-targeting and message-diffusion behavior affect the overall effectiveness of alerting 2) how do the effects of both geo-targeting and message diffusion vary for emergencies (and therefore alerting requirements) of different geographic sizes and 3) how does the interaction of geo-targeting and message diffusion affect the ability to use sophisticated alerting strategies, such as staging in time or delivering different emergency instructions to populations in different areas of risk?

This report is part of the RAND Corporation External publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.