A Hybrid Decision-Making Framework for Selecting the Emergency Alternatives

The frequent occurrence of emergencies has created huge economic losses and numerous casualties and has seriously affected the sustainable development of many societies. The abruptness, destructiveness, unpredictability and complexity of emergency situations pose a great challenge in implementing appropriate responses. To effectively respond to emergencies, it is necessary to select the most suitable, or several, of the numerous emergency plan alternatives, especially when the evolutionary direction of the emergency is highly uncertain. Some progress has been made in the study of emergency alternative selection (EAS) but the capacity for emergency decision-making in real disasters is still quite limited. Therefore, more in-depth research is necessary. As a remedy to the EAS problems, such as unitary information expression, inflexible decision-making processes and insufficient attention to uncertainty, this study proposes a hybrid decision-making method that considers an intuitionistic fuzzy environment, linguistic environment and their hybrid environment, and implements the conversion and processing of decision-making information in different environments based on the Dempster–Shafer theory (DST). This model provides a more flexible evaluation method for decision-makers, and provides a complete decision-making process for EAS. A flood disaster case study from China is used to demonstrate and verify the effectiveness of the proposed model.