Application of fuzzy decision-making method in nuclear emergency

Protective actions such as evacuation, sheltering and iodine administration can be taken to mitigate the radiological consequence in the event of an accidental release. In general, decision-making of countermeasures involves both quantitative and qualitative criteria. The conventional approaches to assessing these criteria tend to be less effective when dealing with those qualitative criteria that are imprecise or vague. In this regard, fuzzy set method is an alternative tool. It can cope with vague assessment in a better way. This paper presents the application of fussy methodology to decision-making of protective actions in nuclear emergencies. In this method linguistic terms and fuzzy triangular numbers are used to represent decision-maker's subjective assessment for different decision criteria considered and decision alternatives versus the decision criteria. Following the assessment performed by specialists, corresponding evaluations can be synthesized and ranked. Finally, the optimal strategy for implementing protective actions can be recommended. (authors)