Evaluating the effectiveness of ERS for vessel oil spills using fuzzy evidential reasoning

. An emergency response system (ERS) for vessel oil spills is a complex and dynamic system comprising a number of subsystems and activities. Failures may occur during the emergency response operations, this has negative impacts on the effectiveness of the ERS. Of the classes of problems in analyzing failures, the lack of quantitative data is fundamental. In fact, most of the empirical data collected via questionnaire survey is subjective in nature and is inevitably associated with uncertainties caused by the human being‟s inability to provide complete judgement. In addition, incomplete information and/or vagueness of the meaning about the failures add difficulties in evaluating the effectiveness of the system. Therefore this paper proposes a framework to evaluate the ERS effectiveness by using the combination of fuzzy reasoning and evidential synthesis approaches. Based on analyzing the procedure of ERS for oil spills, the failures in the system could be identified, using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the relative weight of identified failures. Fuzzy reasoning combined with evidential synthesis is applied to evaluate the effectiveness of ERS for oil spills under uncertainties last. The proposed method is capable of dealing with uncertainties in data including ignorance and vagueness which traditional methods cannot effectively handle. A case study is used to illustrate the application of the proposed method. spills using