Multicriteria Fuzzy Analysis for a GIS-Based Management of Earthquake Scenarios

Objective of this article is the formulation and the implementation of a decision-making model for the optimal management of emergencies. It is based on the accurate definition of possible scenarios resulting from prediction and prevention strategies and explicitly takes into account the subjectivity of the judgments of preference. To this end, a multicriteria decision model, based on fuzzy logic, has been implemented in a user-friendly geographical information system (GIS) platform so as to allow for the automation of choice processes between several alternatives for the spatial location of the investigated scenarios. In particular, we have analyzed the potentialities of the proposed approach in terms of seismic risk reduction, simplifying the decision process leading to the actions to be taken from directors and managers of coordination services. Due to the large number of variables involved in the decision process, it has been proposed a particularly flexible and streamlined method in which the damage scenarios, based on the vulnerability of the territory, have represented the input data to derive a vector of weights to be assigned to different decision alternatives. As an application of the proposed approach, the seismic damage scenario of a region of 400 km(2), hit by the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila (Italy), has been analyzed.