Emergency material reserve location selection by a time-series-based evidential reasoning approach under bounded rationality

Location selection of emergency facilities is a vital issue in the disaster management, which can be considered as a multi-criteria decision making problem with uncertainty. In this regard, the evidential reasoning (ER) approach can be used for such a multiple criteria analysis with uncertain information. However, the original ER approach neither took into account the bounded rationality of experts, nor examined the information at different time nodes, which may not conform to the actual situation of location selection. To solve this problem, we propose a time-series-based ER approach under the bounded rationality of experts to make full use of all evidence. Firstly, we propose a prospect-theory-based modification function to adjust the evidence given by experts and reduce the corresponding subjectivity. Considering the information at different time, we then propose a time-series-based ER approach to generate the comprehensive evidence of each alternative over the whole period. Besides, a VIKOR-based ranking method is proposed to improve the way to rank alternatives in the original ER approach. Finally, the proposed method is applied in the location selection of the emergency material reserve and the corresponding comparative analyses are given to show the rationality of the proposed method.