Evaluating emergency response capacity by fuzzy AHP and 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic approach

Emergency management (EM) is a very important issue with various kinds of emergency events frequently taking place. One of the most important components of EM is to evaluate the emergency response capacity (ERC) of emergency department or emergency alternative. Because of time pressure, lack of experience and data, experts often evaluate the importance and the ratings of qualitative criteria in the form of linguistic variable. This paper presents a hybrid fuzzy method consisting fuzzy AHP and 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic approach to evaluate emergency response capacity. This study has been done in three stages. In the first stage we present a hierarchy of the evaluation index system for emergency response capacity. In the second stage we use fuzzy AHP to analyze the structure of the emergency response capacity evaluation problem. Using linguistic variables, pairwise comparisons for the evaluation criteria and sub-criteria are made to determine the weights of the criteria and sub-criteria. In the third stage, the ratings of sub-criteria are assessed in linguistic values represented by triangular fuzzy numbers to express the qualitative evaluation of experts' subjective opinions, and the linguistic values are transformed into 2-tuples. Use the 2-tuple linguistic weighted average operator (LWAO) to compute the aggregated ratings of criteria and the overall emergency response capacity (OERC) of the emergency alternative. Finally, we demonstrate the validity and feasibility of the proposed hybrid fuzzy approach by means of comparing the emergency response capacity of three emergency alternatives. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.