An improved multi-criteria emergency decision-making method in environmental disasters

Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods deeply assist decision-makers in evaluating and analyzing input data as accurately as possible in the area of safety and reliability. The Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) can be used to rank a set of alternatives based on the different types of criteria. However, this method still needs to be improved; fuzzy set theory and its corresponding extensions are bold in the line of TOPSIS improvement. In this study, the original form of TOPSIS method is extended using Pythagorean fuzzy-based Chebyshev distance measures. Pythagorean fuzzy set has better reflection compared to the conventional fuzzy set theory and Chebyshev distance measures can provide more accurate results, which are used to compute the separation measures in the TOPSIS method. Therefore, the novel improved TOPSIS methods have been developed underlying the ideal of Pythagorean fuzzy-based Chebyshev distance measures. The developed method is applied on a humanitarian case-study to show the efficiency of the approach in an emergency response situation. Results show that the proposed method is efficiently applicable in real-life decision-making situations.