Fuzzy Group Decision Making for Management of Oil Spill Responses

Abstract

The selection of combat strategy to oil spill when multi-criteria and multiperson are involved in the decision process is not an easy task. In case of oil spill, urgent decisions must be made so that the available options of responses are activated in such a way that the environmental, social and economic impacts are minimized. In this context, the decision agents involved in the decision process are the environmental agency, a non-governmental organization (NGO), and a company that get in conflict during the decision process because each one defends its own interests. So, a consensus to reach the best viable solution is desirable. The advantages and disadvantages of different types of combat strategy should be weighted, taking into account the preferences and the different point of view of the decision agents. In this context, the process to form a consensus and to elaborate the response strategies necessarily involves a process of decision making with multi-objectives and multi-person (decision agents) so that the importance of social, economic and environmental factors is considered. In this work, the fuzzy evaluationmethod is applied in order to automatically find the best combat response. The method is applied to evaluate combat response to oil spill in the south coast of the Espirito Santo state, Brazil. Simulation results show the viability of the method.