Bibliometric study on multi-criteria decision-making methods applied to life cycle management of defense systems
Rômullo Girardi, Juraci Ferreira Galdino, Paulo César Pellanda, José Adalberto França, Marcos dos Santos
Abstract
Complex environments, conflicting criteria, uncertainties, and inaccurate information are some characteristics of many nowadays real-world decision-making problems. The Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methodology is one of the most used, perhaps because it drives decision-making processes to be more rational, efficient, and effective. Thus, the Armed Forces of several countries have used MCDM methods in the Life Cycle Management of Defense Systems (LCM-DS) to deal with military systems’ complexity, breadth, and sensitivity. However, despite the rich and vast literature available on several MCDM methods applied to LCM-DS problems, there is a lack of a recent bibliometric study on this relevant subject. This paper presents an analysis of a quantitative approach based on bibliometric metrics to evaluate the application of MCDM methods in LCM-DS. By using the Scopus and Web of Science databases as references, this study focuses on the identification of the following aspects related to the research in this field: distribution of scientific publications, most relevant sources, interaction dynamics among these sources, most prominent subjects in recent research (trend topics), and application of MCDM methods in LCM-DS. Regarding the latter, this study identified the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as the most used method in the LCM-DS since almost a quarter of the analyzed works applied it in the original, adapted, or hybrid (combined with other methods) format. Finally, our results show that MCDM methods are commonly applied to LCM-DS problems in all life cycle stages, mainly in development, utilization, and support.