Risk assessment of rockburst via an extended MABAC method under fuzzy environment

Abstract

The rockburst is a severe underground geological disaster, which has great damage to the workers, equipments and engineering structures. This paper aims to find a suitable way to assess the risk of rockburst within complicated decision making circumstances. First, plenty of literature related to the risk assessment indexes and methods of rockburst is reviewed. On account of the specific characteristics of rockburst, both quantitative and qualitative evaluation indexes are recognized in this paper. Owing to the fuzziness of human thinking and the complexity of risk assessment problems, triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs) are advised to describe these indexes values. Meanwhile, the superiority linguistic ratings of decision makers (DMs) are used to determine the weights of indexes. After that, an extended multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) method corresponding to TFNs is put forward to obtain the ranking results and specific risk levels of rockburst under fuzzy environment. Finally, an example of assessing the risk of rockburst in Kaiyang phosphate mine is illustrated. The rockburst proneness of four crucial areas is evaluated with the proposed method, and the ranking result is consistent with the field status. Besides, the effectiveness of this method is demonstrated with parameter and comparison analyses. The results show that the extended MABAC method is reliable and effective for evaluating the risk of rockburst, and provides references for the prevention and management of rockburst.