Nowadays, factors such as global climate change , environmental damage, and the impact of human activities have led to an increase in natural disasters, and the frequency of natural disaster problems is increasing, which poses a great threat to the safety of people’s lives and property. The increased frequency of natural disasters has increased the need to focus on the ability to prevent and respond to disasters. The increased frequency of natural disasters has increased the need to focus on the capacity for disaster prevention and mitigation. All parties need to take appropriate measures to reduce losses and provide assistance after a disaster occurs. Among them, volunteers are a newly emerged important force for rescue, but volunteers have characteristics that normal rescue organizations do not have, such as voluntary and fragmented nature, therefore, volunteer allocation becomes an important issue today. This study tries to construct a volunteer assignment method, which takes into account several factors in the assignment, such as volunteers’ own willingness to the disaster site, the competency of volunteers’ various abilities, the demand of the disaster site for the task and the time satisfaction of the disaster victims, etc. L-T2FNs are introduced in the assignment process to enhance the degree of certainty; Prospect theory’s value function to consider the disaster victims’ psychology; This study proposes an algorithm to reduce evidence fusion conflicts. This algorithm uses a differential evolutionary algorithm based on the Dempster–Shafer theory to train the lowest conflict index (determined by K and evidence distance) for BPA fusion. Subsequently, the assignment is demonstrated by using the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey in 2023 as an arithmetic example to provide a solution to the problem of how to allocate volunteers to the appropriate disaster sites.

The main emphasis of this paper is placed on the problem of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) in intuitionistic fuzzy environments. Some limitations in the existing literature that explains Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy sets from the perspective of Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) have been analyzed. To offer an effective solution to the problem of using Dempster's rule to aggregate intuitionistic fuzzy values (IFVs), a novel aggregation operator named ordered weighted averaging (OWA)-based mean orthogonal sum (MOS) is proposed, which has advantages in the following aspects: (1) Dempster's rule is the basis of aggregation, (2) the golden rule-based representative value is the basis for sorting, (3) the idea of soft likelihood function is the guide to improve the fusion process, and (4) OWA operator is a tool to express decision makers' subjectivity. To compare different IFVs obtained from the OWA-based MOS approach, the golden rule-based representative value for IFVs comparison is introduced, which can get over the shortcomings of score functions. The hierarchical structure of the proposed decision approach is presented based on the above researches, which allows us to address MCDM issues without intermediate defuzzification when criteria and associated weights are represented by IFVs. The proposed OWA-based MOS approach is illustrated as a more flexible decision method, which can better solve the problem of intuitionistic fuzzy decision-making in the framework of DST.

Multicriteria decision-making approaches have been studied very widely in recent years and are frequently used in many real-life applications. To select the optimal alternative that satisfies the multicriteria, effective aggregation methods are crucial in the decision-making process. The soft likelihood functions (SLF) developed by Yager is introduced as preliminaries of our research, which is a flexible aggregation approach of probabilistic evidence in the context of forensic crime investigations. Motivated by SLF, in this study, a novel aggregation method is proposed based on ordered weighted averaging operator under interval-valued fuzzy environments. To improve the performance of the new aggregation method, the reliability is taken into account in the decision-making process from two perspectives. The first is the reliability of assessment value, including certainty and compatibility, for discounting assessment information; the second is human reliability for redefining SLF. Some numerical examples are given to demonstrate the proposed decision approach. And the reliability-based aggregation method is illustrated more reasonable than the one without considering reliability.

Information fusion under extremely uncertain environments is an important issue in pattern classification and decision-making problems. The Dempster-Shafer evidence theory (D-S theory) is more and more extensively applied in dealing with uncertain information. However, the results contrary to common sense are often obtained when combining different evidence using Dempster's combination rule. How to measure the difference between different evidence is still an open issue. In this paper, a new divergence is proposed based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence to measure the difference between different basic probability assignments (BPAs). Numerical examples are used to illustrate the computational process of the proposed divergence. Then, the similarity for different BPAs is also defined based on the proposed divergence. The basic knowledge about pattern recognition is introduced, and a new classification algorithm is presented using the proposed divergence and similarity under extremely uncertain environments. The effectiveness of the classification algorithm is illustrated by a small example handling robot sensing. The proposed method is motivated by the urgent need to develop intelligent systems, such as sensor-based data fusion manipulators, which are required to work in complicated, extremely uncertain environments. Sensory data satisfy the conditions (1) fragmentary and (2) collected from multiple levels of resolution.

Dempster's combination rule has been widely regarded and applied since it is an effective and rigorous method of synthesizing multisource information with its special information representation (ie, mass function or basic probability assignment). However, it has also been criticized and debated upon regarding some of its unreasonable behaviors and restrictive requirements, such as the counterintuitive results in some cases. To address these issues from different perspectives, in this study, an alternative fusion rule is developed under the framework of Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. A novel evidence combination rule called CR-SLF is proposed based on soft likelihood functions (SLF) considering the ordered weighted average aggregation operator. Some illustrative examples are shown, and the corresponding analyses demonstrate the good performance of CR-SLF to fuse multisource evidence. To extend CR-SLF further, the reliability of multisource evidence is considered from two aspects, subsequently two reliability-based combination rules are presented, including the discount-based rule and the SLF improvement-based rule. The simulation results show that the reliability-based CR-SLF has a better fusion effect than the rule without considering the reliability.

Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) is to select the optimal candidate which has the best quality from a finite set of alternatives with multiple criteria. One important component of MCDM is to express the evaluation information, and the other one is to aggregate the evaluation results associated with different criteria. For the former, Pythagorean fuzzy set (PFS) is employed to represent uncertain information in this paper, and for the latter, the soft likelihood function developed by Yager is used. To address MCDM issues from a new perspective, the likelihood function of PFS is first proposed in this study and, to improve some of its limitations, the ordered weighted averaging (OWA)-based soft likelihood function is defined, which introduces the attitudinal characteristic to identify decision makers' subjective preferences. In addition, the defined soft likelihood function of PFS is extended by weighted OWA operator considering the importance weight of the argument. Several illustrative cases are provided based on the presented (weighted) OWA-based soft likelihood functions in Pythagorean fuzzy environment for MCDM problem.

Inspired by Yager, in this paper, we present the concept of likelihood for intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs), and propose an approach for flexible computation of likelihood functions of IFSs for multicriteria decision-making (MCDM). We employ ordered weighted average (OWA) aggregation method to soften the strong likelihood constraint condition. The OWA measure can be considered as the attitudinal character, which determines OWA weights, including optimistic or pessimistic likelihood values. Then the reliability-based soft likelihood function is developed by considering the reliability of intuitionistic fuzzy information. Some examples are conducted by using the proposed (reliability-based) soft likelihood functions in intuitionistic fuzzy environment for MCDM problem, and the results are analyzed in detail.

Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) was presented as an effective mathematical tool to represent uncertainty. Its significant innovation is to allow the allocation of the belief of mass to sets or intervals, and it becomes a valuable method in the field of decision making and evaluation when accurate information is not available or when knowledge is expressed subjectively by humans. A crucial research issue in DST is the combination of multi-sources of evidence. In this paper, a novel combination rule for Dempster–Shafer structures is developed based on ordered weighted average (OWA)-based soft likelihood functions proposed by Yager. First, the belief intervals, including the belief measures and plausibility measures, of all the hypotheses in the frame of discernment (FOD) are calculated. Second, the representative value of belief interval is defined based on golden rule introduced by Yager. Third, the soft likelihood value of each hypothesis is calculated based on the proposed OWA-based soft likelihood function for belief interval, which can be considered as the combined evidence. The final evaluation results can be employed for practical applications, such as decision making and evaluation. In addition, the improved evidence combination rule is presented which takes into account the weight of evidence. Several illustrative examples are conducted to manifest the use of the developed methods. Finally, an application for environmental impact assessment is given to demonstrate the usefulness of the developed combination rule in DST.