COVID-19 safe campus evaluation for universities by a hybrid interval type-2 fuzzy decision-making model

Environmental Science and Pollution Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-22796-1 RESEARCH ARTICLE COVID‑19 safe campus evaluation for universities by a hybrid interval type‑2 fuzzy decision‑making model Dilber Baskak1 · Sumeyye Ozbey1 · Melih Yucesan1 · Muhammet Gul2 Received: 25 April 2022 / Accepted: 26 August 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022 Abstract The fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, which has affected the whole world in recent years and has had devastating effects on all segments of society, has been one of the most important priorities. The Turkish Standards Institution has determined a checklist to contribute to developing safe and clean environments in higher education institutions in Turkey and to follow-up on infection control measures. However, this study is only a checklist that makes it necessary for decision-makers to make a subjective evaluation during the evaluation process, while the need to develop a more effective, systematic framework that takes into account the importance levels of multiple criteria has emerged. Therefore, this study applies the best-worst method under interval type-2 fuzzy set concept (IT2F-BWM) to determine the importance levels of criteria affecting the “COVID-19 safe campus” evaluation of universities in the context of global pandemic. A three-level hierarchy consisting of three main criteria, 11 sub-criteria, and 58 sub-criteria has been created for this aim. Considering the hierarchy, the most important sub-criterion was determined as periodic disinfection. The high contribution of the interval-valued type-2 fuzzy sets in expressing the uncertainty in the decision-makers’ evaluations and the fact that BWM provides criterion weights with a mathematical optimization model that produces less pairwise comparisons and higher consistency are the main factors in choosing this approach. Simple additive weighting (SAW) has also been injected into the IT2F-BWM to determine the safety level of any university campus regarding COVID-19. Thus, decision-makers will be better prepared for the devastating effects of the pandemic by first improving the factors that are relatively important in the fight against the pandemic. In addition, a threshold value will be determined by considering all criteria, and it will prepare the ground for a road map for campuses. A case study is employed to apply the proposed model, and a comparison study is also presented with the Bayesian BWM to validate the results of the criteria weights. Keywords COVID-19 · Safe campus · Best-worst method · Interval type-2 fuzzy set Introduction Responsible Editor: Lotfi Aleya * Muhammet Gul Dilber Baskak Sumeyye Ozbey Melih Yucesan 1 Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Emergency Aid and Disaster Management, Munzur University, Tunceli, Turkey 2 School of Transportation and Logistics, Istanbul University, 34320 Avcılar‑Istanbul, Turkey The COVID-19 pandemic, which started in China’s Wuhan province in 2020 and spread to the whole world and is named as “world-shattering epidemic,” has created deep cracks in Turkey in many respects and continues to do so. It was officially declared as a “pandemic,” that is, a “global outbreak,” on March 11, 2020, in Turkey (Bostan et al. 2020). All countries worldwide have developed various arguments against this epidemic (Ciotti et al. 2020). Social practices such as “closing all schools,” “flexible working,” and “staying at home” have begun to reduce contact and mobility. These practices started in big cities such as Istanbul and Ankara, where the number of people affected by the epidemic was high; afterward, “use of masks” became one of the standard measures in the whole country (Demirbilek et al. 2020). In 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Environmental Science and Pollution Research addition, awareness-raising activities for personal measures such as “personal hygiene” and “maintaining physical distance” were encouraged (Güner et al. 2020). During the COVID-19 global epidemic period, a number of new applications have been put into effect for universities, which are the biggest pillars of higher education. Some of these applications include suspension of education, distance education, and partial face-to-face education, depending on the regional spread of the virus (Mahmut 2020). In 2021, due to the relative relief provided by the improvement of the vaccination rate, face-to-face education was resumed in universities. Many higher education institutions are environments where more than one unit and the students, academic, and administrative staff of these units come together in the campus environment and where individuals from the society interact. In addition to educational activities, academic research, various services, and administrative activities are also carried out on the campuses. Therefore, in controlling the COVID-19 epidemic by higher education institutions, the risks should be determined in terms of education and their fields of activity, and measures should be taken accordingly (Greenhalgh et al. 2021). In this context, a checklist has been published by the Turkish Standards Institute in order to contribute to the development of the necessary infrastructure for the development of safe and clean environments in universities, to ensure hygienic conditions, to implement and follow infection control measures, and to determine general standards, within the scope of combating the global COVID-19 epidemic and infectious diseases. It started the application of the “Safety Campus” document. Universities that have completed the specified criteria have been qualified for this document, and a step has been taken toward ensuring that students and staff continue their activities more safely. However, in order to transform this checklist into a more systematic and useful structure, a hierarchy of criteria to be used in the assessment of the “COVID-19 safe campus” has been created in this study, and the importance levels of the main criteria, sub-criteria, and sub-sub-criteria within this three-level hierarchy have been determined. The purpose of doing this is to develop a more apparent decision-making mechanism for the universities. In this context, an improved version of the best-worst method (BWM) from multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods is used. The main reason for choosing this method is that it can obtain more reliable and consistent results, is easy to apply, and requires less comparison data (Rezaei 2015). In addition, the weights obtained with BWM can be used independently and with other MCDM methods (Rezaei 2016). Traditional BWM uses only crisp values when comparing (Rezaei 2015). It is inevitable that developing BWM in a fuzzy environment will be beneficial both theoretically and instrumentally (Wu et al. 2019). When fuzzy sets are evaluated, type 2 fuzzy sets 13 (T2FSs) can express uncertainty better than type 1 fuzzy sets (...truncated)