Hazard assessment of landslide dams using the evidential reasoning algorithm with multi-scale hesitant fuzzy linguistic information

Abstract

In the hazard assessment of landslide dams, the decision makers (DMs) are inclined to express some qualitative indicators such as the possible economic loss and the environment influence by linguistic terms. Due to the complexity of emergency environment, it is unrealistic to obtain entire and accurate data of landslide dams in a limited time. Hence, we propose a hazard assessment method based on multi-scale adjacent linguistic terms, namely hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTSs). Besides, to model uncertainties associated with complex situations and subjective evaluations, evidential reasoning (ER), a powerful tool to consistently copy with the uncertainty caused by ignorance and fuzziness, is first applied to aggregate multi-scale HFLTSs. After presenting the α-cut of a HFLTS which reflects the DMs’ prudent degree, we develop a generalized hesitant fuzzy linguistic ER (HFL-ER) method which distributes basic probability mass to each linguistic term in the HFLTS. Then, the special procedures for hazard assessment of landslide dams are provided with the modified indicator system. Finally, a case study about the hazard assessment of 7 landslide dams in the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake verifies the effectiveness and rationality of the HFL-ER method.