A hesitant group emergency decision making method based on prospect theory

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.