ABSTRACT
An emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic affected the rethinking of existing healthcare systems. The increased need for hospital beds appeared short after the outbreak of the pandemic and the solution was to adapt the existing buildings, primarily public ones. Among all, sports buildings, i.e. sports halls were successfully used around the globe for conversion into hospitals. Topic of the paper was to investigate whether sports halls in Serbia, which were also used as temporary hospitals, are suitable for conversion in terms of energy consumption needed for achieving thermal comfort. Two case studies were analysed. The energy simulations were done using the DesingBuilder software. The results of thermal comfort summary and energy consumption led to the conclusion that this building type in Serbia could be successfully used for hospital purposes. Although the multiple increase in energy consumption was noted during the heating period, the results were within the limits required by both national and international standards. © 2023 Society of Thermal Engineers of Serbia Published by the Vinča Institute of Nuclear Sciences, Belgrade, Serbia. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 terms and conditions
ABSTRACT
Governments have been challenged to provide temporary hospitals and other types of facilities to face the COVID-19 pandemic. This research proposes a novel multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) model to help determine how, when, and where these temporary facilities should be installed based on a set of critical success factors (CSFs) mapped in an uncertain environment. We portray the available facilities for temporary hospitals based on the CSFs that must be considered to make critical decisions regarding the optimal position based on the government's strategic decision-making process, thus indirectly providing better services and maximizing resources. In relation to earlier work, this research builds upon hybrid Pythagorean fuzzy numbers to find weights in Best-Worst Methods and rank temporary facilities based on evaluation by an area-based method for ranking. Policy implications and future directions are derived.