Track: Decision Sciences

Abstract

The COVID-19 virus, which was first detected in 2019, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020 and turned into a historical event that affected the whole world. In addition to being a global health crisis, controlling the epidemic, which has become an economic, political and social problem, has become the number one priority of the world's countries. Studies and statistics on the subject have shown the importance of case detection in order to prevent COVID-19. The finding that the number of cases decreases as the number of tests increases is the main reason for this paper. The drive through test station, which was first built in South Korea, has demonstrated that the COVID test practice is much safer, efficient and practical. Although the application started to be used in many countries later on, there is no example in Turkey yet. This paper uses two different multi-criteria decision-making approaches for the drive-through test station location selection in cases of epidemics in Şehitkamil and Şahinbey districts of Gaziantep. In the study, while the considered criteria are prioritized using analytic hierarchy process (AHP), the alternative sites illustrated using Bing Maps are ranked using combinative distance-based assessment (CODAS) approach. As a result of the research, candidate places for drive through test stations that could be established in the event of a possible epidemic in the future, and it is determined that these candidate places could also be used as distribution points in future emergencies other than the epidemic situation.

Keywords
AHP, CODAS, Drive-through, COVID-19, Site selection.