Regional earthquake vulnerability assessment using a combination of MCDM methods

Abstract

The vulnerability assessment is important for earthquake prevention and mitigation. Since many criteria need to be considered during the evaluation process, it can be modeled as a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. This paper proposes an approach which integrates the results of different MCDM methods to provide regional earthquake vulnerability assessment. The key idea of this approach is to determine the most trustable MCDM method by calculating the weights of several MCDM methods using the Spearman’s ranking correlation coefficients. The most trustable MCDM method is the one with the highest weight, which indicates that it has the strongest agreements with other MCDM methods, and is used to provide a final assessment using the combination of other MCDM methods. The proposed approach is applied to evaluate the earthquake vulnerability of 31 Chinese regions using six MCDM methods and eleven vulnerability evaluation indices. The results indicate that the proposed approach can integrate the inconsistent evaluation results of different MCDM methods and produce a comprehensive assessment of regional earthquake vulnerability.