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

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