Addressing site selection for earthquake shelters with hesitant multiplicative linguistic preference relation

To reduce the damage caused by earthquakes, the paper develops a decision-making method under uncertainty, which validly addresses the site selection for earthquake shelters. Since site selection after earthquakes is an emergency decision-making process, during which there always exists inaccuracy and complexity, it is more rational to adopt fuzzy theory to handle this problem. Therefore, we introduce a hesitant multiplicative linguistic preference relation (HMLPR) and propose its consistency measure based on the eigenvector method. An adjustment method is provided to repair the unacceptably consistent HMLPR into acceptably consistent one, and the parameter of the adjustment method is also discussed. To manifest the validity and availability of the proposed method, we choose the Wenchuan Earthquake on May 12th 2008 as the background event. Upon establishing the indicators including scale and location, risk of disaster, rescue facilities, feasibility and resident aspect, three experts from Institute for Disaster Management and Reconstruction of Sichuan University are invited to address the site selection for temporary shelters. The obtained result is approved by the experts as the optimal choice in the case of this paper. Finally, we complete the comparative analysis. The processing efficiency of the proposed method keeps stable and fast when the number of experts and the number of criteria increase from 3 to 10 respectively, which demonstrates that the proposed method is more robust and efficient than the existing method. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.