Identifying and ranking earthquake disaster prevention strategies in Tehran

The disaster management prevention of natural disasters such as earthquake is one of the most challenging urban management issues especially in a metropolis like Tehran. As such, identifying, evaluating and ranking effective earthquake disaster prevention strategies and, in turn, applying these strategies are of great interest to urban decision makers as well as disaster management communities. In this paper, we model the earthquake disaster prevention strategy evaluation and selection problem in Tehran as a multi attribute decision-making problem. To do this, in the first step, possible prevention strategies are derived based on the previously reported researches as well as our experts' opinions. Then, the time and cost of the possible prevention strategies, the risk of going without each of these strategies as well as the applicability of each strategy are assumed to be the decision-making criteria. The relative importance of these criteria is derived based on the disaster management experts' judgements in terms of linguistic variables. Afterwards, the fuzzy AHP is applied to derive the weights of criteria, and finally the preference ranking organisation method for enrichment evaluation is used to rank the possible prevention strategies. As an illustrative real case study, we applied the proposed model to evaluate and rank the possible earthquake disaster prevention strategies in Tehran. The result suggests establishing regulations and compiling instructions as the first ranked strategy for earthquake disaster prevention plan in Tehran.