D-DEMATEL: A new method to identify critical success factors in emergency management

Due to the variety and destructiveness of disasters, emergency management has emerged as a world theme and attracted more and more public attention. A large quantity of research on optimizing the emergency management has been done while still has improvement space. In this paper, a new method called D-DEMATEL which combines D number theory and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) to identify the critical success factors (CSFs) in emergency management is proposed. Firstly, multiple experts evaluate the direct relations of influential factors in emergency management respectively from positive and negative side. The evaluation results are presented as intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IFNs). Secondly, convert the IFNs into D numbers and use the combination rule of D numbers to fuse group opinions. Thirdly, based on DEMATEL, the cause-effect classification of factors can be obtained. Finally, the factors in cause category are identified as CSFs in emergency management. Based on the proposed method, the optimization of emergency management can be efficiently simplified into optimizing the identified CSFs. The proposed method is well addressed the fuzziness and subjectivity in linguistic assessment. Hence, the proposed method is well applicable to identify the CSFs in emergency management which inherently has a linguistic assessment process.