Prioritization of Schedule Dependencies in Hurricane Recovery of Transportation Agency

A transportation agency must consider the efficiency of its hurricane preparedness, response, and recovery operations. This paper develops and demonstrates a methodology to identify and characterize the schedule dependencies and subsequent delays that arise among federal, state, and local agencies and organizations involved in the pre and posthurricane processes in order to reduce the time for a region to recover from a natural disaster. The large scale of an agencyʹs overall recovery from a natural disaster presents a challenge to conventional scheduling models, including program evaluation and review technique and critical-path methods. A metanalysis to support agency resource allocation is thus developed as follows. Instances of schedule dependencies from past recoveries are collected and categorized according to the functional and organizational units of the agency. A categorical study is performed to highlight the functional units that are associated with the greater numbers of dependencies. The agency better understands which units need attention and which interfaces among units need improved coordination. The results of an example show that the interfaces of the Information Management unit and the Operations unit are sources of a significant portion of the dependency scenarios collected. The significance of the dependencies to the overall recovery is characterized in a multiattribute analysis. The analysis expresses the magnitude of a dependency in terms of its controllability, the involved agencies, resources involved, prevalence of similar scenarios, cascading effects, maturity, likelihood in the future, and severity in terms of its time duration. A transportation agency can use the developed methodology to identify, prioritize, and minimize the negative effects of schedule dependencies within and among agencies in recovery from a regionwide disaster. Recommendations are given to improve higher-level coordination both among the involved agencies and within the transportation agency.