Abstract
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.
Highlights
The definition of emergency event (EE) is [1] “events which suddenly take place causing or having the possibility to cause intense death and injury, property loss, ecological damage and social hazards”, such as landslides, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, etc
To manage the limitations mentioned above, this study proposes a novel emergency decision making (EDM) method based on game theory (GT) and prospect theory (PT) that takes into account decision maker (DM’s) psychological behavior by means of PT and different situations handled by using different measures based on GT
Due to the information about EE usually being inadequate or incomplete, especially in the early stage in a real-world situation, and related emergency situations become more and more complicated with the dynamic evolution of EE across time, it is hard for decision maker (DM) to describe the EE using just one type of information; for convenience, different types of information will be used to describe the situation of EE and emergency response alternatives [15,16]
Summary
The definition of emergency event (EE) is [1] “events which suddenly take place causing or having the possibility to cause intense death and injury, property loss, ecological damage and social hazards”, such as landslides, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, etc. All the research with and without PT has made important contributions to EDM; both of them have limitations that they do not take into consideration about the different emergency situations, which are caused by the dynamic evolution and uncertainty of EEs, nor do they consider DM’s psychological behavior. Each emergency situation should be considered and be handled by proper measures because of the limited resources in the real world and the importance of DM’s psychological behavior in the decision process. Different studies [19,26,27] have shown that DMs have limited rationality under an environment with risk and uncertainty, and the DM’s psychological behavior is very important to the decision process in EDM problems and must be considered.
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