An extended TODIM approach for group emergency decision making based on bidirectional projection with hesitant triangular fuzzy sets

•A new extended TODIM method is presented to deal with emergencies.•Decision maker's psychological behavior is considered in the proposed method.•A novel approach for obtaining attribute weights is proposed.•Apply an emergency problem to verify the proposed method. With the recent Covid-19 outbreak, group emergency decision-making (GEDM), as a new management model to pursue both social stability and decrease the negative impact of emergencies, has become highly popular. Evaluating and choosing the best emergency response is the core of the GEDM and selecting the choices can be regarded as a multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) problem. Due to the increasing complexity and fuzziness of emergency decision-making environment, decision-makers (DMs) often cannot express completely rational preference information in many real EDM situations. At the same time, the existing methods seldom consider the DM’s psychological mindset at the point of decision making. In this paper, an extended TODIM (an acronym for interactive and multi-criteria decision-making in Portugese) method based on bidirectional projection is proposed to solve the GEDM problem in the context of hesitant triangular fuzzy sets (HTFSs) and the novel method is applied to a case study and compared with other existing methods. The validity and applicability of the proposed method are discussed.