An extensible complex spherical fuzzy decision making model based selection framework for the food waste treatment method

Abstract

Food waste has been recognized as one of the most severe environmental problems globally. Food waste management is an effective procedure for achieving global food security, which requires rational and efficacious waste treatment and disposal techniques. Thus, selecting proper and suitable food waste treatment methods is one of the most significant food waste management issues. However, existing selection frameworks based on decision-making models for food waste treatment methods can seldom handle this issue with complicated uncertainty and periodic information. Accordingly, this paper aims to generate a complex spherical fuzzy information-based selection framework for evaluating the food waste treatment method with mutual support and periodicity decision information. First, the complex spherical fuzzy sets express subjective and uncertain selection information. Then, the power weighted average (PWA) operator for complex spherical fuzzy numbers is introduced to fuse the decision information of mutual support from experts that can reflect the impact of information with supportive relationships. Next, an extensible ARAS (Additive Ratio Assessment) approach-based selection framework is constructed to determine the most sustainable food waste treatment method in which the distance-measure-based weighting method is utilized to calculate the importance degrees of criteria. Finally, a case study of evaluating food waste treatment methods is expounded to display the application of the proposed framework. The result indicates that the alternativea2(Anaerobic digestion) is the most sustainable method for food waste treatment with the largest utility degree (0.920). After that, the comparison studies are also performed to illustrate further the reasonability and effectiveness of the proposed selection framework. The result shows that stakeholders can adopt the proposed methodology to improve the performance of the evaluation of food waste treatment.