HurricaneLog: A humanitarian logistics game on hurricane preparedness and response operations

Abstract

Natural and man-made disasters are recurrent on the planet, causing structural, economic and social damages. More particularly, Caribbean hurricanes originated in the Atlantic annually affect the lives of thousands of people. The damages caused by such events often exceed national coping capacities, requiring the aid of non- governmental organizations (NGOs) to help the impacted population. Due to the stochastic nature of climatic disasters, humanitarian agents must be trained over diversified scenarios to improve their decision-making process, making links between past and new events. In this paper, we present a serious game that simulates Atlantic hurricane seasons and whose objective is to serve as a training tool for humanitarian logistics teams regarding disaster relief actions under time and resource constraints. We describe how the game is played, its features and learning objectives, the game design challenges and deployed solutions.