Risk analysis of hurricane disruptions on workforce and interdependent regional sectors

In today's society, infrastructure and economic systems have become more complex and highly coupled. Natural disasters, such as hurricanes, have the potential to cause physical disruptions to an infrastructure system (e.g., a damaged highway), which consequently affects workforce availability. Workforce disruptions in the aftermath of a hurricane can adversely impact regional economic productivity as workforce contributes significantly in the production of commodities and delivery of services. Furthermore, the recovery process is further exacerbated by the inherent interdependencies among economic sectors, which give rise to direct and indirect economic losses in the affected regional economy. This paper investigates the effects of reduced workforce levels on the production outputs of industry sectors in the aftermath of a hurricane. The risk-based framework in this research allows the decomposition of risk assessment and risk management processes to address risk-related questions pertaining to hurricane scenarios. This paper develops a workforce recovery model to assess workforce disruption scenarios in the aftermath of a hurricane. This is accomplished by accounting regional data and historical scenarios associated with the formulation of the workforce disruption model. The process includes translating workforce absenteeism into production losses, noting that workforce absenteeism can affect the quality and availability of products and services provided by the industry sectors. The extended methodology is capable of identifying critical workforce sectors on the basis of two metrics: (i) inoperability, which measures the “normalized loss” of each sector as a proportion of its total production output; and (ii) economic loss, which measures the monetary worth of the reduced production of an industry sector. The enhancements to the DIIM formulation are incorporated into a decision support tool and then applied to a case study to implement various hurricane scenarios for the Commonwealth of Virginia. The objective of the case study is to illustrate the impacts of different hurricane categories on Virginia's workforce availability and its cascading effects to the regional economy. Furthermore, the identification of such critical sectors supports the decision-making process by narrowing the focus on sectors that incur the greatest production losses due to workforce unavailability. Given the uncertainty involved in modeling the reductions in workforce availability, this research offers a risk-based framework that can guide the process of assessing and managing hurricane impacts on regional interdependent systems.