Use of a Fuzzy Decision-making Approach in an Analysis of the Vulnerability of Street Networks for Disaster Management

Authors

• Zhe Zhang
• Kirsi Virrantaus

Abstract

Disaster management with respect to urban structures has received more attention in recent years. In disaster management, the most vulnerable structures in a modern society are the critical networks, such as transportation networks. The vulnerability analysis of spatial networks should not depend only on the topological structure; some non-topological attributes, such as population information, should also be considered. In a rescue operation, decision-making problems are very often uncertain or vague because of the lack of information. Therefore, the classi cation of a high or low-risk area on the basis of spatial information should not have crisp boundaries and it would be more reasonable to use a fuzzy approach. In this paper, population information and a betweenness centrality measure of the road network were used as the evaluation criteria, and a fuzzy multiple-attribute decision-making (MADM) approach was used to support a vulnerability analysis of the road network of Finland for disaster management. In order to validate the model, results were compared with original population information and a betweenness attribute map. The validation results showed the hotspots in a fuzzy MADM vulnerability map have a similar pattern to an original input attributes map and the number of hotspots were reduced to a reasonable scale in order to improve rescue e ciency.