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

当飓风逼近时，应急管理人员必须决定何时何地发布官方疏散命令。它需要整合大量不确定的、不断变化的信息，以便在压力下在短时间内做出相应的决定，而且风险很高。利用最近的研究，特别是基于场景的综合疏散（ISE）工具，有机会帮助应对这一挑战。该团队设计了ISE工具，以便在飓风接近美国时运行，当在某个时间点运行时，它会生成一套应急计划，并根据飓风的发展情况定义实施每种计划的情况。每个计划都包括是否对每个地理疏散区发布疏散令的建议，如果是，何时发布。虽然这项新技术前景光明，但从研究到实践的转变也带来了挑战。因此，第一阶段的目标是：(1)确定新工具及其产出如何支持应急管理人员的自然决策过程；(2)对工具进行需求评估；(3)促进对社区灾害管理创新的理解。第二阶段的目标是为北卡罗来纳实现基于ise的决策支持工具的可操作原型。应急管理伙伴将确保该工具实际使用；研究人员将确保它反映了最好的科学；行业合作伙伴将通过在他们的平台上托管它来确保其影响是可持续的。ISE工具使用多阶段随机规划模型来提供推荐疏散命令的树状图，并对该建议集进行性能评估。该工具的优点是，它提供了一个综合的不确定性危害评估，包括风暴潮、风浪、潮汐、河流排放、内陆洪水和风力的影响；它明确地平衡了最小化风险和旅行时间的竞争目标；它提供了一个很好的对冲解决方案，在飓风演变的范围内是稳健的；它是自适应的，利用在事件中减少不确定性的价值。第一阶段将包括关键利益相关者的焦点小组，以确定创新过程；需求评估；以及下一阶段的分析和计划。在第二阶段，我们将(1)通过将工具移动到GPU平台并利用并行化的机会，使工具更快，更容易运行；(2)开发交互式图形用户界面；(3)通过增加机构弱势群体的治疗来改进模型。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.