Selection of maritime safety control options for NUC ships using a hybrid group decision-making approach

Maritime safety control is an essential step to mitigate risk in the well-known formal safety assessment framework. The selection of safety control options for NUC (not under control) ships is a challenge due to many influencing factors, together with the different preference formats on the attributes among the multiple involved organizations. This paper proposes a hybrid group decision-making approach to facilitate NUC ship safety control by incorporating fuzzy logic, consistency-based linear programming and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). The kernel of the new method is to use fuzzy logic to obtain the attributes values by integrating the associated influencing factors, to employ consistency-based linear programming model to gain the interval weights of attributes, and to introduce TOPSIS for final decision-making. Consequently, this work provides a practical decision framework for NUC ship safety control. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.