Emergency Alternative Evaluation Using Extended Trapezoidal Intuitionistic Fuzzy Thermodynamic Approach with Prospect Theory

Emergency alternative evaluation (EAE) is crucial to improve emergency management performance, which is considered an important factor in achieving sustainable development. This paper proposes an integrated fuzzy method to deal with the EAE problem. The existence of information uncertainties and decision-makers (DMs) psychological behavior are considered due to the complexity of emergency environments. By utilizing trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy numbers to depict the fuzziness and uncertainty of information, prospect theory is developed to portray DMs’ heterogeneous psychological behavior and convert the initial decision matrixes into decision prospect matrixes. A thermodynamic approach that comprises operations on entropy, energy, and exergy is introduced to maximize the use of decision-making information, determine each criterion weight value, and assess information quantity and quality. Trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy Choquet integral operator and weighted averaging operator are presented to integrate the overall prospect value of each alternative. A score function with risk attitudinal parameter of DMs is introduced to obtain the final ranking order of the alternatives. A multi-step framework and solution procedure is then presented, and an illustrative case study is followed to investigate the EAE problem by selecting a provincial highway department in China, which confirms the practicability of our proposed solution approach.