An effective Decision making model through Fusion Optimization and risk associated with flash flood hazards: A case study Asyut, Egypt

Abstract

One of the most dangerous natural disasters, which causes massive damage all over the world, is flash floods. Therefore, the assessment of flash floods disasters is considered increasingly urgent and important. The widely used techniques for studying and analyzing the causes and impact of natural hazards are multi-criteria techniques. Several researchers used traditional multi-criteria decision-making techniques in the estimation process of flash floods problems as the analytical hierarchy process, decision making trial and evaluation laboratory and analytic network process. The main disadvantage of these traditional models is the incapability of simulating and reflecting uncertain human thoughts. Since neutrosophic logic has a great ability for simulating human’s thoughts and increase the flexibility of expert's preferences in real world problems, we applied it in this study. There are different locations in Egypt that are at a serious risk of flooding, especially in Upper Egypt. Asyut has suffered from frequent flash floods, with some flood events that lead to mortality, damages, and economic losses in the last decades. The intensity of floods in Egypt varies from year to year, according to several climatic and hydrological variables. This study focuses on using a Neutrosophic Decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (N-DEMATEL) technique with remotely sensed data and geographical information system (GIS) for producing a flash floods hazard map. The N-DEMATEL technique is applied to determine the weights of various factors that related to flash flooding, including elevation, slope, topographic wetness index, distance from the stream, flow accumulation, aspect, flow direction, soil, land cover, watershed, curvature, drainage density , total population , population density and precipitation. The obtained weight of selected criteria used then to produce the flood hazard map (FHM) using a raster calculator tool in geographic information system.