Risk decision analysis in emergency response: A method based on cumulative prospect theory

Emergency response of a disaster is generally a risk decision‐making problem with multiple states. In emergency response analysis, it is necessary to consider decision‐maker's (DM's) psychological behavior such as reference dependence, loss aversion and judgmental distortion, whereas DM's behavior is neglected in the existing studies on emergency response. In this paper, a risk decision analysis method based on cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is proposed to solve the risk decision‐making problem in emergency response. The formulation and solution procedure of the studied emergency response problem are given. Then, according to CPT, the values of potential response results concerning each criterion are calculated. Consider the interdependence or conflict among criteria, Choquet integral is used to determine the values of each potential response result. Accordingly, the weights of probabilities of all potential response results are calculated. Furthermore, by aggregating the values and weights of response results, the prospect value of each response action (alternative) is determined, and overall prospect value of each response action is obtained by aggregating the prospect value and the cost of each action. According to the obtained overall prospect values, a ranking of all response actions can be determined. Finally, based on the background of emergency evacuation from barrier lake downstream villages, an example is given to illustrate the feasibility and validity of the proposed method.