The applications of MCDM methods in COVID-19 pandemic: A state of the art review

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.