Application of TOPSIS in evaluating public crisis management capability under a fuzzy environment

This paper develops an evaluation approach based on the Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), to evaluate the government's crisis management capability in a fuzzy environment where the vagueness and subjectivity are handled with linguistic terms parameterized by triangular fuzzy numbers. This study applies the fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method to determine the importance weights of evaluation criteria and to synthesize the ratings of crisis event. Aggregated the evaluators' attitude toward preference; then TOPSIS is employed to obtain a crisp overall capability value for each alternative to make a final decision. This approach is demonstrated with a real case study involving 9 evaluation criteria, 4 crisis event assessed by 4 evaluators. And the case study demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the model.