PMID- 35795407
OWN - NLM
STAT- PubMed-not-MEDLINE
LR  - 20221006
IS  - 1568-4946 (Print)
IS  - 1872-9681 (Electronic)
IS  - 1568-4946 (Linking)
VI  - 126
DP  - 2022 Sep
TI  - The applications of MCDM methods in COVID-19 pandemic: A state of the art review.
PG  - 109238
LID - 10.1016/j.asoc.2022.109238 [doi]
AB  - Likened to the economic calamity of World War Two, the COVID-19 pandemic has 
      sparked fears of a deep economic crisis, killed more than six million people 
      worldwide and had a ripple effect on all aspects of life. MCDM (multi-criteria 
      decision making) methods have become increasingly popular in modeling COVID-19 
      problems owing to the multi-dimensionality of this crisis and the complexity of 
      health and socio-economic systems. This paper is aimed to review 72 papers 
      published in 37 leading peer-reviewed journals indexed in Web of Science that 
      used MCDM methods in different areas of COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, data 
      retrieval follows the PRISMA protocol for systematic literature reviews. 35 
      countries have contributed to this multidisciplinary research and India is 
      identified as the leading country in this field followed by Turkey and China. 
      Also 36 articles, namely 50% of papers are presented in the form of international 
      cooperation. "Applied Soft Computing" is the journal with the highest number of 
      articles whereas "Journal of infection and public health" and "Operations 
      Management Research" are ranked in the second place. The results indicate that 
      AHP (including fuzzy AHP) is the most popular MCDM method applied in 37.5% of 
      papers followed by TOPSIS and VIKOR. This review reveals that the use of MCDM 
      methods is one of the most attractive research areas in the field of COVID-19. As 
      a result, one of the main purposes of this work is to identify diverse 
      applications of MCDM methods in the COVID-19 pandemic. Most studies i.e. 69% (49 
      papers) of the papers combined various fuzzy sets with MCDM methods to overcome 
      the problem of uncertainty and ambiguity while analyzing information. 
      Nevertheless, the main drawback of those papers has been the lack of theoretical 
      justifications. In fact, fuzzy MCDM methods impose heavy computational load and 
      there is no general consensus on the clear advantage of fuzzy methods over crisp 
      methods in terms of the solution quality. We hope the researchers who applied 
      fuzzy MCDM methods to COVID-19-related research understand the theoretical basis 
      of MCDM methods and the serious challenges associated with basic operations of 
      fuzzy numbers to avoid potential disadvantages. This paper contributes to the 
      body of knowledge via suggesting a deep vision to critique the fuzzy MCDM methods 
      from mathematical perspective.
CI  - (c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
FAU - Sotoudeh-Anvari, Alireza
AU  - Sotoudeh-Anvari A
AD  - Department of Industrial Engineering, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad 
      University, Tehran, Iran.
LA  - eng
PT  - Journal Article
PT  - Review
DEP - 20220630
PL  - United States
TA  - Appl Soft Comput
JT  - Applied soft computing
JID - 101536968
PMC - PMC9245376
OTO - NOTNLM
OT  - COVID-19
OT  - Fuzzy arithmetic
OT  - Fuzzy set
OT  - Multi-criteria decision making
OT  - Systematic review
COIS- The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or 
      personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in 
      this paper.
EDAT- 2022/07/08 06:00
MHDA- 2022/07/08 06:01
PMCR- 2022/06/30
CRDT- 2022/07/07 02:28
PHST- 2021/11/20 00:00 [received]
PHST- 2022/05/26 00:00 [revised]
PHST- 2022/06/22 00:00 [accepted]
PHST- 2022/07/07 02:28 [entrez]
PHST- 2022/07/08 06:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2022/07/08 06:01 [medline]
PHST- 2022/06/30 00:00 [pmc-release]
AID - S1568-4946(22)00456-2 [pii]
AID - 109238 [pii]
AID - 10.1016/j.asoc.2022.109238 [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO  - Appl Soft Comput. 2022 Sep;126:109238. doi: 10.1016/j.asoc.2022.109238. Epub 2022 
      Jun 30.