A novel multi-criteria decision-making framework for selecting municipal solid waste management alternative with 2-dimensional uncertain linguistic sets.

Abstract

Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) has been considered as a complicated multi-criteria decision-making problem for the uncertain context and related criteria. To select an optimal MSWM scenario, this paper provides a comprehensive MCDM framework for decision-makers under 2-dimensional uncertain linguistic (2-DUL) environment. Distinguished from traditional approaches, this framework not only guarantees the consistency of comparison matrix but improves effectiveness and efficiency in the decision process. Moreover, it accurately solves the cardinal and ordinal information of MSWM scenarios. Firstly, due to ambiguous and uncertain decision context, the 2-DUL set, characterized by I class of the linguistic evaluation information and II class of the reliability of the assessment results, is adopted to describe decision-makers' preference. An expectation reduced-dimension is developed to effectively handle 2-DUL set. Secondly, to guarantee consistency and reduce numerical pairwise comparisons, a best-worst-method (BWM)-based analytic network process (ANP) is utilized to form the local priority vectors of the main criteria and sub-criteria. Main criteria weights and sub-criteria weights are then obtained by aggregating all local priority vectors. Thirdly, an extended QUALIFLEX approach is employed to rank all alternative MSWM scenarios by comparing the weighted concordance/discordance index among overall possible permutations of all alternative scenarios. Finally, the developed framework is applied in a case study to determine an optimal MSWM scenario in Beijing. Additionally, a comparison analysis is complemented. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework is feasible, efficient, and superior in MSWM scenarios selection.