Emergency alternative evaluation under group decision makers: a new method based on entropy weight and DEMATEL

With the increasing occurrence frequency of emergency events, how to select the most desirable alternative has emerged as one critical issue in emergency management. In this paper, we propose a new method combining entropy weight and DEMATEL (decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory) to manage emergency alternative selection under group decision makers. Firstly, IFN (intuitionistic fuzzy number) is introduced to represent linguistic assessment of decision makers under different criteria. Secondly, based on belief entropy, the weight of decision makers is determined and then applied in IFWA (intuitionistic fuzzy weighted averaging) operator to fuse group assessment. Thirdly, with the weight of criteria calculated by DEMATEL, TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) is used to rank emergency alternatives. Two case studies are illustrated to demonstrate the efficiency and practicability of the proposed method through the comparison of other existing methods. The proposed method has three advantages: (1) Via IFN and IFWA operator, it is simple and efficient to address the representation and fusion of linguistic assessment under uncertain information. (2) DEMATEL can help decision-makers weight the importance of criteria considering their direct and indirect effects; (3) Belief entropy can well measure the uncertainty of information and is capable of determining the weight of experts objectively.