TY  - JOUR
AB  - Purpose This paper aims to demonstrate how to make emergency decision when decision makers face a complex and turbulent environment that needs quite different decision-making processes from conventional ones. Traditional decision techniques cannot meet the demands of today’s social stability and security.Design/methodology/approach The main work is to develop an instance-driven classifier for the emergency categories based upon three fuzzy measures: features for an instance, solution for the instance and effect evaluation of the outcome. First, the information collected from the past emergency events is encodes into a prototype model. Second, a three-dimensional space that describes the locations and mutual distance relationships of the emergency events in different emergency prototypes is formulated. Third, for any new emergency event to be classified, the nearest emergency prototype is identified in the three-dimensional space and is classified into that category.Findings An instance-driven classifier based on prototype theory helps decision makers to describe emergency concept more clearly. The maximizing deviation model is constructed to determine the optimal relative weights of features according to the characteristics of the new instance, such that every customized feature space maximizes the influence of features shared by members of the category. Comparisons and discusses of the proposed method with other existing methods are given.Practical implications To reduce the affection to economic development, more and more countries have recognized the importance of emergency response solutions as an indispensable activity. In a new emergency instance, it is very challengeable for a decision maker to form a rational and feasible humanitarian aids scheme under the time pressure. After selecting a most suitable prototype, decision makers can learn most relevant experience and lessons in the emergency profile database and generate plan for the new instance. The proposed approach is to effectively make full use of inhomogeneous information in different types of resources and optimize resource allocation.Originality/value The combination of instances can reflect different aspects of a prototype. This feature solves the problem of insufficient learning data, which is a significant characteristic of emergency decision-making. It can be seen as a customized classification mechanism, while the previous classifiers always assume key features of a category.
VL  - 49
IS  - 2
SN  - 0368-492X
DO  - 10.1108/K-08-2018-0454
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/K-08-2018-0454
AU  - Cai Mei
AU  - Wei Guo
AU  - Cao Jie
PY  - 2019
Y1  - 2019/01/01
TI  - Categories in emergency decision-making: prototype-based classification
T2  - Kybernetes
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 526
EP  - 553
Y2  - 2024/04/25
ER  -