Use of a fuzzy decision-making method in evaluating severe accident management strategie

In developing severe accident management strategies, an engineering decision would be made based on the available data and information that are vague, imprecise and uncertain by nature. These sorts of vagueness and uncertainty are due to lack of knowledge for the severe accident sequences of interest. The fuzzy set theory offers a possibility of handling these sorts of data and information. In this paper, the possibility to apply the decision-making method based on fuzzy set theory to the evaluation of the accident management strategies at a nuclear power plant is scrutinized. The fuzzy decision-making method uses linguistic variables and fuzzy numbers to represent the decision-makerʹs subjective assessments for the decision alternatives according to the decision criteria. The fuzzy mean operator is used to aggregate the decision-makerʹs subjective assessments, while the total integral value method is used to rank the decision alternatives. As a case study, the proposed method is applied to evaluating the accident management strategies at a nuclear power plant.