Location Decision of Emergency Medical Supply Distribution Centers Under Uncertain Environment

To mitigate losses from public health emergencies, promptly choosing an emergency medical supply distribution center is essential. The success of rescues hinges on the center's location. Location decision for such centers is fraught with uncertainty and risk, complicating the task for decision makers (DMs). Often, DMs operate under bounded rationality in urgent situations. In response, this paper introduces a novel fuzzy multicriteria decision-making approach, integrating interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers, interval intuitionistic trapezoidal fuzzy numbers, not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) effect, and cumulative prospect theory, to address the uncertainty and risk in decision-making. The method begins by introducing the NIMBY effect to construct the evaluation criteria system of emergency medical supply distribution centers. Next, the alternative under the evaluation criteria is evaluated by fuzzy linguistic terms and interval intuitionistic trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. The interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers are used to determine the weight of each DM by calculating the relative scores of advantage and disadvantage. The criteria weight is determined via a combination of fuzzy network analysis and the entropy weight method. Cumulative prospect theory is then employed to rank site selections, factoring in DM risk preferences. The approach is tested on an emergency medical supply distribution center location for sensitivity and comparative analysis, proving its efficacy and stability. This research presents an innovative fuzzy model for evaluating emergency medical supply distribution center site selection in uncertain conditions, suggesting the need to incorporate multiple dimensions such as realistic criteria systems, uncertain decision information, and variable environments in such decision-making processes.