| Abstract: | Oil spill disasters may have devastating impacts for coastal communities and the ecosystem (Baade et al., 2007). For instance, the coastal regions of the United States, especially the Gulf region, have been devastated by oil spill events of varying sizes, resulting in significant ecological and economic losses (Baade et al., 2007; Smith et al., 2010). In this study, a human-centered multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework is proposed and then present an example assessment of oil spill vulnerability utilizing the framework to support oil spill risk-informed decision-making in Texas coastal areas and the Western Planning Area (WPA) in the Gulf of Mexico. This work aims to assess oil spill vulnerability by defining three major conceptualizations of vulnerability: socioeconomic vulnerability, environment vulnerability, and vulnerability of spill impact risk through the Blowout and Spill Occurrence Model (BLOSOM) simulation. Furthermore, a decision support system is developed with an MCDM framework by combining spatiotemporal simulation results from BLOSOM and the vulnerability indexes. The proposed framework is applied to identify areas prone to oil spill disasters with the combination of spatial-temporal analysis and a customized multi-criteria evaluation. Areas with higher vulnerability scores in the case study are considered more vulnerable to oil spill impacts and should be considered with high priority in emergency response. Results indicated that communities in Galveston, Freeport, and Corpus Christi areas, are under great threat from oil spill disasters under conditions similar to those in the simulation. Moreover, the proposed framework emphasizes human-centered design and collaborative decision-making where different decision-makers can select the data that are important for their decision goals and assign weights for the evaluation criteria to generate an overall vulnerability score from vulnerability indexing to improve the performance of collaborative decision-making and eventually facilitate oil spill response and management. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/198136 |
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