A multicriteria evaluation methodology for assessing the impact of COVID-19 in EU countries

Our purpose in this paper is to develop an integrated multicriteria evaluation methodology for assessing the impact of COVID-19 in the 27 countries of the European Union. Initially, a specialized and comprehensive set of normalized criteria metrics that capture several dimensions of the pandemic, such as infection, mortality, recovery and testing rates, is carefully specified. Then, by means of a well-established and intuitive weighting system, which directly takes into consideration the experts’ preferences, the gravity of each criterion is determined properly. Next, two of the most popular multicriteria ranking techniques, i.e. the TOPSIS and the PROMETHEE II, are simultaneously exploited in order to derive and integrate the obtained evaluations. Moreover, the value of the suggested decision support system is enriched through the introduction of a novel element in the field of multicriteria analysis, i.e. the ‘2-dimensions evaluation plane’, a data visualization concept which provides rich information to the decision maker, by fruitfully blending the ranking results of the utilized multicriteria methods. The validity of the proposed approach is verified through an indicative illustrative application on Coronavirus data for the European Union countries, deriving a wide spectrum of insightful conclusions. Finally, the flexibility of the suggested framework is also stressed, since it can be fully customized, both in terms of the selected criteria and its weights, and run repetitively under a specific time-step frequency, according to the evolution dynamics and implications of the underlying pandemic.