A collaborative emergency decision making approach based on BWM and TODIM under interval 2-tuple linguistic environment

Emergencies require various emergency departments to collaborate to achieve timely and effective emergency responses. Thus, the overall performance of emergency response is influenced not only by the efficiency of each department alternative but also by the coordination effect among different department alternatives. This paper proposes a collaborative emergency decision making (CEDM) approach considering the synergy among different department alternatives based on the best–worst method (BWM) and TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of interactive and multiple attribute decision making) method within an interval 2-tuple linguistic environment. First, the evaluation information provided by decision makers (DMs) is represented by interval 2-tuple linguistic variables to reflect and model the underlying diversity and uncertainty. On the basis of the DMs’ evaluations, the individual and collaborative performance evaluations of multi-alternative combinations composed of different department alternatives are constructed. Then, the BWM is extended into interval 2-tuple linguistic environment to obtain the weights of evaluation criteria, where the group decision making is taken into account in an interval fuzzy mathematical programming model. Furthermore, to derive more practical and accurate decision results, an interval 2-tuple linguistic TODIM (ITL-TODIM) method is proposed by considering the DMs’ psychological behaviours. In the developed ITL-TODIM method, both the gain and loss degrees of one alternative relative to another are simultaneously computed. Finally, a numerical example is presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed method. Sensitivity and comparative analyses are also provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed approach.