HurricaneLog: A Humanitarian Logistics Game on Hurricane Preparedness and Response Operations

HurricaneLog is a serious game designed to train humanitarian logistics teams in hurricane preparedness and response, addressing a gap in existing humanitarian games, which have largely overlooked preparation and response processes. Its central argument is that logistics decisions made under pressure can determine whether relief reaches affected populations in time, and that structured training can build the situation awareness and analytical decision-making these operations require. The authors ground this case in the scale of the problem, citing Hurricane Maria's death toll of over 4,600 and the annual Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June through December.

The game places players in the role of an inter-governmental agency coordinating preparedness and response across four Caribbean island nations, each profiled by population, gross national income, risk index, and logistics performance. Players first allocate a constrained preparedness budget across options such as prepositioning, warehousing, shipping agreements, communications, and contingency planning, then manage relief distribution throughout the hurricane season. Performance is measured through response time, operational cost, and people affected. The rationale rests on the observation that logistics accounts for roughly 80 percent of relief operation costs, and that expert players tend to rely on analytical strategies rather than trial and error.

The design models these island nations using real hurricane data and established humanitarian logistics processes, with supply chains simplified into four automated stages to sustain engagement. To reconcile realism with playability, the developers set game time at one hour per real second, limited hurricane-free periods to two days, and drew on published damage formulas to estimate population and warehouse losses by storm category. The authors present the game as a training instrument whose core lessons are that preparedness investment and tailored decision-making drive logistics success, with planned future work using gameplay data to study how players make decisions. Supporting evidence draws on forecasting archives, humanitarian logistics research, and evidence that serious games have produced positive or neutral educational outcomes in 90 percent of 40 studied papers.