Enhancing fuzzy evidential reasoning approach using dynamic adjustment mechanism and new rule-based transformation for engineering emergency response evaluation

Abstract

With the frequent occurrence of various emergency events in engineering field, engineering emergency response (EER) evaluation plays an increasingly significant role in handling such situations and provides great challenges to research since the uncertain information and the urgent response time. Aiming at achieving timely and effective emergency response, an enhanced evidential reasoning (ER) approach based on the dynamic adjustment mechanism and new rule-based transformation is proposed. First, the linguistic terms to represent various preference information provided by experts are encoded into the trapezoidal interval type-2 fuzzy sets (TrIT2FSs) with different granularities. Second, for ensuring the validity of the information, based on the definition of the expert decision risk preference coefficients, a dynamic adjustment mechanism is constructed to identify and adjust the preference information. Meanwhile, combined with social network, the experts’ weights can be calculated and revised several times to obtain group information. Then, a new rule-based transformation and related optimization models are proposed to convert the TrIT2FSs into interval belief structures. Furthermore, considering the importance of attributes, the relative weights and interval belief structures are combined. Finally, according to integrated interval belief structures obtained by the analytical ER algorithm, a new ranking approach with the optimism degree and decision tendency degree is constructed to rank the interval expected utility and score utility of each alternative. To further show the effectiveness, superiorities, and stability of the proposed method, a case study on the EER evaluation is preformed and some comparisons and discussions are provided.