Fire Safety Evaluation for Scenic Spots: An Evidential Best-Worst Method

Abstract

Fire safety plays a vital role in tourism management, which can cause significant loss of life and property. It is necessary to present an efficient fire safety evaluation for scenic spots. However, some key issues are not well addressed in existing methods. For example, how to model experts’ opinions and how to combine them are still open problems. To address these issues, a new evaluation method based on the Dempster–Shafer evidence theory and best-worst method is presented. First, a fire safety evaluation index system is constructed using the domino model. Domain experts can evaluate different factors with linguistic assessments. The best-worst method is used to determine the weights of different factors. Then, these weighted linguistic assessments are efficiently fused by Dempster’s combination rule to obtain the evaluation result. Finally, a case study is illustrated to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method in fire safety evaluation for scenic spots. The main contribution of the proposed method is to represent and handle the uncertainty in experts’ linguistic assessments, so as to decrease the uncertainty and improve decision making. In addition, the weight determination method BWM is easier and more reliable than the existing method AHP.