A dynamic emergency response decision-making method considering the scenario evolution of maritime emergencies

Abstract

In order to reduce the losses caused by maritime emergencies, it is crucial to select an alternative for timely response after the occurrence of maritime emergencies. However, maritime emergencies involve uncertainty, complexity, and information incompleteness within the scenario evolution process, making it difficult for decision-makers to evaluate with crisp numbers in a completely rational situation. Moreover, decision-makers need to dynamically adjust the emergency response based on the changing scenario. In response, this paper proposes a novel dynamic emergency response decision-making method that not only deals with the problem of fuzzy decision-making under bounded rationality, but also ameliorates the effects of early evaluations within the dynamic adjustment process on later decisions. Specifically, the decision-makers’ evaluations of alternatives in a hesitant fuzzy environment are represented as probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs). Subsequently, a new dissimilarity measure for the PLTSs based on the Jensen-Shannon divergence is proposed and combined with prospect theory (PT), which describes the decision-makers’ psychological behavior. From this, a new static rating calculation method is developed. Furthermore, a static rating-based, dynamic rating method that can reflect the historical evolution of alternatives is put forward to rank alternatives in order to determine the best response option. Finally, an example of a maritime accident is applied to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method, and a comparative analysis is performed to validate its effectiveness as a decision-making support tool for maritime emergency managers.