Multi-attribute group emergency decision making (MAGEDM) has become a valuable research topic in the last few years due to its effectiveness and reliability in dealing with real-world emergency events (EEs). Dynamic evolution and uncertain information are remarkable features of EEs. The former means that information related to EEs is usually changing with time and the development of EEs. To make an effective and appropriate decision, such an important feature should be addressed during the emergency decision process; however, it has not yet been discussed in current MAGEDM problems. Uncertain information is a distinct feature of EEs, particularly in their early stage; hence, experts involved in a MAGEDM problem might hesitate when they provide their assessments on different alternatives concerning different criteria. Their hesitancy is a practical and inevitable issue, which plays an important role in dealing with EEs successfully, and should be also considered in real world MAGEDM problems. Nevertheless, it has been neglected in existing MAGEDM approaches. To manage such limitations, this study intends to propose a novel MAGEDM method that deals with not only the dynamic evolution of MAGEDM problems, but also takes into account uncertain information, including experts’ hesitation. A case study is provided and comparisons with current approaches and related discussions are presented to illustrate the feasibility and validity of the proposed method.

After an emergency event (EE) happens, emergency decision making (EDM) is a common and effective way to deal with the emergency situation, which plays an important role in mitigating its level of harm. In the real world, it is a big challenge for an individual emergency manager (EM) to make a proper and comprehensive decision for coping with an EE. Consequently, many practical EDM problems drive group emergency decision making (GEDM) problems whose main limitations are related to the lack of flexibility in knowledge elicitation, disagreements in the group and the consideration of experts’ psychological behavior in the decision process. Hence, this paper proposes a novel GEDM approach that allows more flexibility for preference elicitation under uncertainty, provides a consensus process to avoid disagreements and considers experts’ psychological behavior by using the fuzzy TODIM method based on prospect theory. Eventually, a group decision support system (GDSS) is developed to support the whole GEDM process defined in the proposed method demonstrating its novelty, validity and feasibility.

Group emergency decision-making (GEDM) problems have drawn great attention in past few years due to its advantages of dealing with the emergency events (EEs) effectively. Due to the fact that EEs are usually featured by lack of information and time pressure, decision makers (DMs) are often bound rational and their psychological behaviors are very crucial to the GEDM process. However, DM’s psychological behaviors are neglected in current GEDM approaches. The assessments representing the individual wisdom provided by each expert are usually aggregated in the GEDM process. Nevertheless, the aggregation process always implies summarization of data that can result in loss of information. To overcome these limitations pointed out previously, this paper proposes a new GEDM method that considers the DM’s psychological behaviors in the decision process using prospect theory and replaces the aggregation process by a fusion method with hesitant fuzzy set, which keeps the experts’ information as much as possible. A case study is provided to illustrate the validity and feasibility of the proposed method.

Because of the continuous burst of emergency events (EEs) recently, emergency decision making (EDM) has become an active research topic due to its crucial role in relieving and reducing various losses and damages (property, lives, environment, etc.) caused by EEs. Current EDM studies based on prospect theory (PT) have considered decision maker’s (DM’s) psychological behavior, which is very important in the EDM process because it affects DM’s decision behavior directly, particularly under the uncertainty decision environment. However, those studies neglected an important fact that different emergency situations should be handled by different measures to show the pertinence and effectiveness of the emergency response in the real world, which has been taken into consideration in EDM studies based on game theory (GT). Different behavior experiments show that DMs usually have limited rationality when involved in risk and an uncertain decision environment, in which their psychological behavior has distinct impacts on their decision choice and behavior. Nevertheless, the existing studies of EDM based on GT build on an assumption that DMs are totally rational; however, it is obvious that such an assumption is unreasonable and far from the real-world situation. Motivated by these limitations pointed out previously, this study proposes a novel EDM method combining GT and PT that considers not only the DM’s psychological behavior, but also takes different situations’ handling for EEs into account, which is closer to the EDM problems in reality. An example and comparison with other methods are provided to demonstrate the validity and rationality of the proposed method for coping with real-world EDM problems.