An evidential DEMATEL method to identify critical success factors in emergency management

As the result of the warmer climate and the worse environment, human beings are facing with more serious natural disasters. It is urgent to improve emergency management. Due to the fact that performance of emergency management is affected by many factors, it is difficult to improve all of them in limited resources. Thus, a feasible way is to figure out some important and urgent ones to optimize. For this purpose, a new method identifying the critical success factors (CSF) is proposed in this paper. In this method, the evaluations of influencing factors in the form of intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IFNs) are converted into basic probability assignments (BPAs). Then Dempster-Shafer theory is adopted to combine group decision. By doing so, there is no need for defuzzification of IFNs, and DEMATEL is applied on each fused BPA to seek for a final result from different aspects. Finally, five CSFs are found out. By optimizing the five CSFs, the effectiveness and efficiency of the whole emergency management could be greatly promoted. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.