Abstract
When major emergencies or accidents occur, risk evaluation and
prediction are the most important means to reduce the impact of these
disasters. Typical risk evaluation uses the failure mode and effects
analysis (FMEA) method for failure risk ranking and control. However,
when faced with severe special infectious diseases such as COVID-19,
there will be many cognitive and information uncertainties that the FMEA
method is unable to effectively handle. To effectively deal with the
issue of risk evaluation during the COVID‐19 pandemic, this paper
integrated the risk priority number and spherical fuzzy sets methods to
propose a novel emergency risk evaluation method. In the numerical
verification, this paper applied the example of avoiding secondary
COVID-19 transmissions in the hospital to explain the calculation
procedure and validity of the proposed new emergency risk evaluation
approach. The calculation results were also compared with the typical
RPN, fuzzy set, and intuitionistic fuzzy set methods. The calculation
results showed that the proposed new emergency risk evaluation approach
could effectively handle the cognitive and information uncertainties of
emergency risk evaluation issues during the COVID-19 pandemic.