An aggregative fuzzy risk analysis for flood incident management

Abstract

Mitigation of loss or damage is the prime focus in flood incident management (FIM). Emergency response program, a key element in flood incident management can fail in multiple ways; however it can be mainly attributed to failure of infrastructure and/or failure of human institutions. Characterization and quantification of various risk factors in emergency response is a difficult task because responses to floods are complex and dynamic in nature. For these reasons, high level of uncertainties are inherent in the estimation of risk associated with the emergency response and may warrant the usage of a quantitative–qualitative risk assessment framework. In this paper, a multi-stage hierarchical model is developed to estimate the aggregative risk associated with the failure of emergency response system in case of flood. Each risk item is defined by the product of the likelihood of a failure event and associated consequences. Both likelihood and the consequences of a failure event are defined using fuzzy numbers to capture vagueness in the concept of relevant risk factors. An analytic hierarchy process is used for estimating the priority matrix (weights) for grouping risk attributes. Utility of a proposed model is demonstrated through a simplified risk hierarchy representing emergency response system failure of a FIM.