A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Model with Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets for Evaluating Digital Technology Strategies in COVID-19 Pandemic Under Uncertainty

Abstract

Coronavirus diseases 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is an essential challenge to the health and safety of people, medical members, and treatment systems worldwide. Digital technologies (DTs) have been universally introduced to improve the treatment of patients during the pandemic. Nevertheless, only a few governments have been partly successful in executing the DT strategies. In this regard, it is critical to demonstrate a suitable strategy for the governments. This problem is built based on the experts' opinions with some conflicting criteria to evaluate various types of alternatives. Hence, this research presents a new multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model under uncertain conditions. For this reason, interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IVIFSs) are employed to help decision-makers (DMs) evaluate in a broader area and cope with uncertain information. Moreover, a new extended weighting method based on weighted distance-based approximation (WDBA) and a new combined ranking approach are proposed to determine the DMs’ weights and rank the alternatives under IVIF conditions. The developed weighting method is constructed based on computing the DMs’ weights with objective criteria weights. Furthermore, a new ranking approach is proposed by obtaining two ranking indexes separately: The first and second ranking indexes are calculated according to the positive and negative ideal solutions distances and the nature of criteria weights, respectively. Afterward, the final values of rankings are computed by considering a new aggregating procedure. The results of the proposed model represent the first alternative as the best strategy. Comparisons between the IVIF-TOPSIS and IVIF-VIKOR methods are also provided to investigate the proposed model to determine the rankings of main alternatives. Sensitivity analyses are conducted to check the reliability and the robustness of the model. For this purpose, criteria weights are analyzed to compute the dependencies’ degree of the new extended weighting method. The dependencies of the ranking model are discussed on the criteria weights as well.