Evaluating Emergency Response Solutions for Sustainable Community Development by Using Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making Approaches: IVDHF-TOPSIS and IVDHF-VIKOR

Junling Zhang, Gajanan G. Hegde, Jennifer Shang and Xiaowen Qi
Additional contact information
Junling Zhang: College of Economics and Management, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua 321004, China
Gajanan G. Hegde: Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
Jennifer Shang: Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
Xiaowen Qi: Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA

Sustainability, 2016, vol. 8, issue 4, 1-28

Abstract: Emergency management is vital in implementing sustainable community development, for which community planning must include emergency response solutions to potential natural and manmade hazards. To help maintain such solution repository, we investigate effective fuzzy multi-criteria group decision making (FMCGDM) approaches for the complex problems of evaluating alternative emergency response solutions, where weights for decision makers and criteria are unknown due to problem complexity. We employ interval-valued dual hesitant fuzzy (IVDHF) set to address decision hesitancy more effectively. Based on IVDHF assessments, we develop a deviation maximizing model to compute criteria weights and another compatibility maximizing model to calculate weights for decision makers. Then, two ideal-solution-based FMCGDM approaches are proposed: (i) by introducing a synthesized IVDHF group decision matrix into TOPSIS, we develop an IVDHF-TOPSIS approach for fuzzy group settings; (ii) when emphasizing both maximum group utility and minimum individual regret, we extend VIKOR to develop an IVDHF-VIKOR approach, where the derived decision makers’ weights are utilized to obtain group decision matrix and the determined criteria weights are integrated to reflect the relative importance of distances from the compromised ideal solution. Compared with aggregation-operators-based approach, IVDHF-TOPSIS and IVDHF-VIKOR can alleviate information loss and computational complexity. Numerical examples have validated the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

Keywords: multi-criteria decision making; group decision making; interval-valued dual hesitant fuzzy set; TOPSIS; VIKOR (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/4/291/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/4/291/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:8:y:2016:i:4:p:291-:d:66441

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().