The Hurricane Decision Simulator: A Tool for Marine Forces in New Orleans to Practice Operations Management in Advance of a Hurricane

Abstract

The U.S. Marine Forces Reserve (MFR) in New Orleans is frequently threatened by hurricanes. To protect the safety of personnel and their families while maintaining mission capability, the Commander must make timely decisions to set up an alternate headquarters and allow for an orderly evacuation. The MFR relies on forecasts from the National Hurricane Center, but these forecasts are uncertain, are updated frequently, and can be difficult to interpret in the context of the MFR's decision timeline. In addition, there are few opportunities to learn from experience.We developed the Hurricane Decision Simulator (HDS) to allow MFR personnel to practice making preparation decisions in the context of many realistic simulated storms and forecasts, and to develop a better understanding of the decision sequence, the forecast products and their relationship. The HDS has improved MFR's training and readiness for hurricane preparation operations and decision making by enabling more and better focused training and is being extended to other facilities.

Incorporating inland flooding into hurricane evacuation decision support modeling

“…It also includes representations of hazard uncertainty, such as the cone of uncertainty, and automatically updates the forecasts when they are issued every 6 h. Similarly, the evacuation management decision support system (EMDSS) conveniently displays relevant information about the forecast and clearance times, including uncertainty and costs of decision errors (Lindell and Prater 2007;Lindell 2008). The Hurricane Decision Simulator combines user decisions, simulated storms, and outcomes based on the user's decisions and storm behavior in a tool to help the US Marine Forces Reserve practice making preparation decisions (Regnier and MacKenzie 2018). These tools incorporate representation of the hazards, and dynamics and uncertainty over the course of an event, but while they provide important information to decision-makers, they do not go so far as to actually recommend specific actions.…”

Integrating narratives into decision making for complex systems engineering design issues

“…Narratives provide a context for how people make decisions with uncertainty, [114][115][116] and a narrative simulation can help decision makers understand that uncertainty. 117 A narrative simulation usually requires a user to read a story or description and then make decisions that will change the narrative and lead to different courses of action. 118 Because the outcome of the narrative can evolve in several different ways, this type of narrative simulation has been labeled as a branching narrative.…”

Failures in the communication of risk: Decisions and numeracy

“…In this game, a decision maker is given the forecast of a potential loss event, and then chooses between risking the loss or taking costly action to avoid the risk. Many of the important decisions people face have this basic cost–loss structure; these include decisions in the areas of medicine, weather (Regnier & MacKenzie, 2017) personal finance, and public choice issues such as economic, public health (such as mask wearing), and climate policy. The game we examine abstracts away from the details of individual instances to concentrate on the shared, essential elements of cost–loss decisions.…”

“…Forecasts are uncertain in nature, an important complication in the question of how best to communicate forecasts to the public. This question has become a pressing concern to many areas in the scientific enterprise (Burgman, 2016;Fauci, 2017;National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018;Ramakrishnan, 2017). The conundrum was well illustrated by Dr. Ranu S. Dhillon's comments concerning the communication of the uncertainty in COVID-19 pandemic forecasts:…”