Bibliometric study on multi-criteria decision-making methods applied to life cycle management of defense systems

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.