Preferred hospitalization of COVID-19 patients using intuitionistic fuzzy set-based matching approach

Preferable hospitalization of COVID-19 patients has become an urgent and challenging task to save lives amidst the unexpected rising of the 3rd wave, where fuzzy set and matching techniques are considered due to their inherent capability to deal with uncertain suitable pair selection. The matching technique has been widely used to solve decision-making problems due to its capability to determine the suitable pair between the objects of two disjoint sets, whereas fuzzy set is well known to manage uncertain situations. This paper extends the matching technique using fuzzy set and proposes a novel fuzzy matching approach to solve uncertain decision-making problems. We also extend the fuzzy matching approach in the framework of an intuitionistic fuzzy set. A relation between the matching technique and fuzzy set theory is established by developing the preference sequence of the elements. The fuzzy entropy is used to measure the closeness among the elements between two distinct sets. Applicability of the proposed approach is measured by providing an illustrative case study concerned with the preferred hospitalization of the COVID-19 patients. Finally, a comparative study is given to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed approach, where the intuitionistic fuzzy set-based matching approach shows better performance compared to fuzzy and conventional matching based approach. For experimentation purpose, this study uses 9424 patients and 234 hospitals with a total available capacity of 18,024 beds.