Emergency alternative evaluation under group decision makers: A method of incorporating DS/AHP with extended TOPSIS

How to select suitable emergency alternative is critical to emergency management and has attracted much attention for both researchers and practitioners. In the process of evaluating emergency alternative problems, there usually exists incomplete and uncertain information, and the decision makers can not easily express their judgments on the candiates with exact and crisp values. The Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) is well suited for dealing with such problems and can generate comprehensive assessments for different alternatives. In this paper, the DS/AHP method and extended TOPSIS method are incorporated to solve group multi-criteria decision making (GMCDM) problems with incomplete information. The proposed method involves three steps: (1) Identify the focal elements of each decision maker according to the group decision matrix. (2) Construct the group weighted normalized belief interval decision matrix using Dempster’s rule of combination. (3) Propose the Extended TOPSIS approach for group interval data to rank the emergency alternatives. In this method, the positive ideal solution vector is defined as the maximum plausibility of all emergency alternatives with respect to each criterion, and the negative ideal solution vector is defined as the minimum belief of all emergency alternatives with respect to each criterion. An emergency alternative evaluation selection problem is taken as an illustrative example to demonstrate the feasibility and practicability of the proposed methods for group decision making in emergency management. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.