An extended prospect theory–VIKOR approach for emergency decision making with 2-dimension uncertain linguistic information

Emergency situations often require high-quality decisions which have to be made within a short period of time. An emergency event is often complex and can cause huge loss of lives and property if a wrong decision is made. Therefore, emergency decision making (EDM) has become a very high-profile research topic in recent years. In this paper, a new integrated approach based on prospect theory and VIKOR (VIsekriterijumska optimizacija i KOm-promisno Resenje), called linguistic PT-VIKOR, is proposed for solving the EDM problems with 2-dimension uncertain linguistic information. First, the preference information and the weights of criteria provided by experts for all statuses are expressed in the form of 2-dimension uncertain linguistic variables (2DULVs). Then, the individual experts’ opinions of each status are aggregated into a group decision matrix according to the aggregation operators of 2DULVs. Next, the group decision matrices of all statuses are transformed into a prospect decision matrix on the basis of the prospect theory, and the VIKOR technique is applied to rank the alternative solutions. Finally, the feasibility and practicability of the proposed linguistic PT-VIKOR approach is illustrated by an illustrate example and a comparative analysis.