A quantitative decision-making model for emergency response to oil spill from ships

Oil spill from ships poses a serious threat to the marine environment and can cause great losses of energy resources. The emergency response to oil spill from ships is challenging owing to the time limitation and resource constraint, together with the lack of historical data. This paper proposes a quantitative decision-making model for early emergency response to oil spill from ships to address the abovementioned problems. The kernel of this model is first to establish a hierarchical decision-making framework after identification and quantification of the influencing factors and alternatives from the previous works, integrating them by using evidential reasoning algorithm while the weights are obtained by using linguistic terms. This proposed model is applied to a real oil spill from ship and the result demonstrates that the proposed model is reasonable to select the best response action to oil spill from ships with small volume of oil spill and close distance to the fairway.