A cause and effect relationship model for location of temporary shelters in disaster operations management

The aim of the location of temporary shelter directly is to focus on helping the sufferers and injured people on disaster areas during and after a disaster. Facility location (location of temporary shelters) decisions play a critical role and affect directly performance of relief operations in disaster operations management (DOM). In this paper, a proactive decision-making tool by integrating decision-making trail and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method with interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2FSs) is proposed to locate of temporary location in DOM. While DEMATEL method enables to analyse cause and effect relationship in decision-making process, the IT2FSs overcome ambiguity and vagueness of linguistic assessment of decision-makers through the DEMATEL. 14 different criteria for location of temporary shelters are considered by 9 disaster operation managers for evaluating the cause and effect factors. Beside the theoretical contribution of the proposed method, it provides practical benefits to disaster operation managers to perceive cause and effect relationship on location of temporary shelters.