U.S. Army Corps of Engineers:
Hurricane Econometrics Model
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) continues to be actively engaged in natural disaster recovery throughout the Nation. USACE provides support to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during the initial stages of the hurricane recovery operations and USACE provides support to Congress relative to short and long‐term construction needs by preparing action plans and budgets and executing construction contracts in support of the reconstruction in and around the devastated area. As a sub-contractor to MOCA Systems, iParametrics provided analytical support and modeling to the Department of the Army for a Market Construction Cost Study of Hurricane Impacts on military construction programs.
You’ve got to be setting some sort of new standard with your hurricane analysis. That should be a great boon to the cost community and a long-lived resource for many years. Plus—the graphics are really cool.
– Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (Environment and Installation Management)
Situation
Hurricanes have significant cost implications for civil works and military construction projects. The Army needed a reliable model to quantify these financial impacts and improve how such costs are estimated and justified in future program budgets.
Task
iParametrics was tasked with analyzing historical hurricane data, civil/military construction cost elements, and economic indicators to build a machine learning model that could predict Construction Unit Price Hurricane Premiums (CUP HP) across various regions.
Action
Using SAS JMP, PACES, Esri ArcGIS, and Qlik, we collected empirical data from DOD experts and cost databases, engineered features using machine learning, and applied geospatial analytics to simulate hurricane impacts. We built a statistical model capable of guiding military planners in integrating disaster premiums into capital planning.
Result
The model successfully forecasted regional hurricane price premiums, improving cost estimation accuracy for post-disaster military projects. Defense leadership praised the tool as a new standard in hurricane cost modeling and a lasting resource for future planning.