A tool for the simulation of alert message propagation in the general population

Informing and alerting the population in disaster situations is a challenging task. Numerous situational factors have to be considered, as well as the impact of a plethora of communication channels, and multiplication effects in the population. In order to optimize the alerting strategies and enhance alert planning, it would be beneficial to model the dissemination of alerts. In this paper, we present a general overview of an alert dissemination model as well as its prototypical implementation in a simulation software. The software takes situational parameters such as time of day and location into account and can even infer characteristics of the alerting infrastructure from geospatial information.