A combined approach for emergency management using AHP and system dynamics

Emergency management plays a critical role in industrial plants design and management. The investigation of all the entities involved and the possible factors, which intervene during an emergency, can determine the safety of human life and the security of assets. In this article, the authors use the AHP method to derive a ranking of factors which affect both the development of the emergency events and the various entities involved in the disaster. The AHP ranking is then used by a system dynamics model that reproduces an emergency scenario that takes into account all the variables and the entities involved. By performing several experiments, the system dynamics model shows that the emergency management is strongly affected by the parameters considered by AHP. Therefore, having identified the key factors, it's possible to act on them to achieve better management of resources, the least number of victims and the best assets protection.