An extended multi-criteria group decision-making method with psychological factors and bidirectional influence relation for emergency medical supplier selection

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak spread rapidly worldwide, posing a severe threat to human life. Due to its unpredictability and destructiveness, the emergency has aroused great common in society. At the same time, the selection of emergency medical supplier is one of the critical links in emergency decision-making, so undertaking appropriate decision-making using scientific tools becomes the primary challenge when an emergency outbreak occurs. The multi criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) method is an applicable and common method for choosing supplier. Nevertheless, because emergency medical supplier selection should consider regarding many aspects, it is difficult for decision makers (DMs) to develop a comprehensive assessment method for emergency medical supplier. Therefore, few academics have focused on emergency situation research by the MCGDM method, and the existing MCGDM method has some areas for improvement. In view of this situation, in this study, we propose a new MCGDM method, which considers the bidirectional influence relation of the criteria, consensus and the psychological factors of DMs. It providers a good aid in emergency decision-making and it could apply to other types of MCGDM research. Firstly, DMs give their assessment in interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2FSs). Secondly, an extended IT2FSs assessment method and a novel ISM-BWM-Cosine Similarity-Max Deviation Method (IBCSMDM) are used for weighing all alternatives. The TODIM (an acronym for interactive and multi-criteria decision-making in Portuguese) can obtain the ranking results under different risk attenuation factors. Eventually, this extended IT2FSs-IBCSMDM-TODIM method is applied in a real case in Wuhan in the context of COVID-19 to illustrate the practicability and usefulness.