Decision Under Weather Uncertainty and Infrastructure Protection for Alcantara Launch Center

Abstract Decision-making using weather information is often a complex and high impact process, and in some situations, can disturb the functioning of technological facilities. In this sense, the aim of this paper is to present a decision support approach for infrastructure protection under weather uncertainty at the Alcântara Launch Center, in Brazil. From an operational demand, a weather index was developed to identify the decision maker's attitude about the three characteristics of meteorological information: a) weather forecast probability; b) lead time of the information; c) value of a meteorological variable. As a case study, we analyzed a real decision-making problem for the protection of an aerospace vehicle and integration tower in the Brazilian space center. Through the development of an index with the users, it was concluded that for low probabilities (< 20%) or extended lead time (> 24 h), the group of users do not use weather information to make decisions, even with a prognosis of extreme conditions. The quantitative results showed that the decision model managed to incorporate the attitude of non-meteorologist users regarding the handling of uncertainty in weather forecasts.