SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: An Integrated Scenario-based Hurricane Evacuation Management Tool to Support Community Preparedness

As a hurricane approaches, emergency managers must determine when and where to issue official evacuation orders. It requires integrating large amounts of uncertain, changing information to make consequential decisions in a short time frame under pressure, and the stakes are high. An opportunity exists to leverage recent research—in particular, the Integrated Scenario-based Evacuation (ISE) tool—to help meet that challenge.

This team designed the ISE tool to be run for a particular hurricane as it approaches the U.S. When run at a point in time, it generates a set of contingency plans and defines the circumstances under which to implement each, depending on how the hurricane evolves. Each plan includes recommendations about whether or not to issue an evacuation order for each geographic evacuation zone, and if so, when.

While the new technology has promise, moving from research to practice brings its own challenges. The objectives of Stage 1, therefore, are to: (1) Determine how the new tool and its output can support emergency managers’ natural decision-making process; (2) Conduct a needs assessment for the tool; and (3) Advance understanding of community innovation in disaster management.

The Stage 2 objective is to implement an operational prototype of the ISE-based decision support tool for North Carolina. The emergency manager partners will ensure the tool is of practical use; the researchers will ensure it reflects the best science; and the industry partner will ensure its impact is sustainable by hosting it on their platform.

The ISE tool uses a multi-stage stochastic programming model to provide a tree of recommended evacuation orders and a performance evaluation for that set of recommendations. Benefits of the tool are that it provides an integrated hazard assessment with uncertainty that includes the effects of storm surge, wind waves, tides, river discharge, inland flooding, and wind; it explicitly balances competing objectives of minimizing risk and travel time; it offers a well-hedged solution robust under the range of hurricane evolutions; and it is adaptive, leveraging the value of decreasing uncertainty during an event.

Stage 1 will include focus groups of key stakeholders to determine the process of innovation; a needs assessment; and analysis and planning for the next stage. In Stage 2, we will (1) make the tool faster and easier to run by moving it to a GPU platform and exploiting opportunities for parallelization; (2) develop an interactive graphical user interface; and (3) improve the modeling by adding treatment of institutionalized vulnerable populations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.