To better optimize the decision chain in a maritime disaster context, allowing a reduction both in time of support and costs, recently, the authors considered the facilities and high qualified staff of Portuguese Navy proposing a variant of the Delphi method, a method where the opinion of each element of a team is considered an important information source to contribute to a decision, implementing a system that prioritize certain teams for perform specific in incidents, taking into account the importance of each team that acts in case of a disaster occurrence. Continuing the work developed recently and extending the technique used before, in the present manuscript, we propose an adjustment of each expert opinion weight when the Delphi method is applied. The weight of each expert does not not depend on years of expert experience exclusively but also from the type of such experience. Firstly, we have used the hierarchical classification, allowing to identify different patterns for experts with the “‘same experience”’. Also discriminant analysis and multidimensional scaling revealed to be adequate techniques for this issue. The experience of each expert was evaluated using the proximity/distance between the individuals in the group of proposed experts and compared with the number of consensus presented. We hope to have given an improvement to the optimization o the decision support system used in a maritime disaster context of the Portuguese Navy.

This work was supported by Portuguese funds - Center of Naval Research (CINAV), Portuguese Naval Academy, Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), through the Center for Computational and Stochastic Mathematics (CEMAT), project UID/Multi/04621/2019.

Decision support system Expert Delphi method Questionnaire Catastrophe Multidimensional scaling