An Online Learning Approach towards Far-sighted Emergency Relief Planning under Intentional Attacks in Conflict Areas

A large number of emergency humanitarian rescue demands in conflict areas around the world are accompanied by intentional, persistent and unpredictable attacks on rescuers and supplies. Unfortunately, existing work on humanitarian relief planning mostly ignores this challenge in reality resulting a parlous and short-sighted relief distribution plan to a large extent. To address this, we first propose an offline multi-stage optimization problem of emergency relief planning under intentional attacks, in which all parameters in the game between the rescuer and attacker are supposed to be known or predictable. Then, an online version of this problem is introduced to meet the need of online and irrevocable decision making when those parameters are revealed in an online fashion. To achieve a far-sighted emergency relief planning under attacks, we design an online learning approach which is proven to obtain a near-optimal solution of the offline problem when those online reveled parameters are i.i.d. sampled from an unknown distribution. Finally, extensive experiments on a real anti-Ebola relief planning case based on the data of Ebola outbreak and armed attacks in DRC Congo show the scalability and effectiveness of our approach.