Emergency alternative evaluation and selection based on ANP, DEMATEL, and TL-TOPSIS

With the increasing occurrence frequency of emergency events, emergency management (EM) has been a very important issue in management science. One of the major activities of EM is to evaluate and select the most desirable emergency alternative(s). This paper proposes a new framework combining the analytic network process (ANP) method, the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique, and 2-tuple linguistic technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TL-TOPSIS) method to solve the emergency alternative evaluation and selection problem. This study has been done in three stages. In the first stage, we use DEMATEL technique to obtain the network relation map (NRM) among emergency alternative evaluation criteria or sub-criteria. In the second stage, we use ANP method to calculate the global weight of each sub-criterion based on the NRM among emergency alternative evaluation sub-criteria. In the third stage, the ratings of emergency alternative with respect to each sub-criterion are described by linguistic items, and the TL-TOPSIS method is used to rank the emergency alternative. Finally, a practical example of urban fire emergency alternative selection is given to illustrate the application of the proposed framework. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015