Identifying Qualified Public Safety Education Venues Using the Dempster–Shafer Theory-Based PROMETHEE Method under Linguistic Environments

Abstract

How to improve safety awareness is an important topic, and it is of great significance for the public to reduce losses in the face of disasters and crises. A public safety education venue is an important carrier to realize safety education, as it has the characteristics of professionalism, comprehensiveness, experience, interest, participation, and so on, arousing the enthusiasm of the public for learning. As a meaningful supplement to “formal safety education”, venue education has many advantages. However, there are problems in the current venue construction such as imperfect infrastructure, weak professionalism, poor service level, chaotic organizational structure, and low safety, which affect the effect of safety education. To evaluate safety education venues effectively, this study proposes an evidential PROMETHEE method under linguistic environments. The innovation of this study lies in the integration of various linguistic expressions into the Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) framework, realizing the free expression and choice of evaluation information. The results and contributions of this study are summarized as follows. First, a two-tier evaluation index system of public safety education venues including 18 sub-standards is constructed. Secondly, it sets up four levels of quality evaluation for public safety education venues. Third, the belief function is used to represent all kinds of linguistic information, so as to maximize the effect of linguistic information fusion. Fourthly, an evidential PROMETHEE model is proposed to rank the venues. Fifthly, a case study is presented to demonstrate the usage of the proposed method in detail, and the evaluation results are fully analyzed and discussed. The implications of this study are as follows. First of all, to enhance public safety education, people need to face the significance of experiential education venues. Second, experiential education venues can increase learners’ enthusiasm for learning. Thirdly, the evaluation index system provided in this paper can be used to guide the construction of appropriate education venues in cities. Fourthly, the method of linguistic information transformation based on DST is also applicable to other decision-making and evaluation problems. Finally, the evidential PROMETHEE method can not only evaluate the quality of education venues, but also be used to rank a group of alternative venues.