Abstract
Health-care waste (HCW) management is a major challenge for municipalities, particularly in the cities of developing nations. Selecting the best treatment technology for HCW can be regarded as a complex multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) issue involving a number of alternatives and multiple evaluation criteria. In addition, decision makers tend to express their personal assessments via multi-granularity linguistic term sets because of different backgrounds and knowledge, some of which may be imprecise, uncertain and incomplete. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to propose a new hybrid decision making approach combining interval 2-tuple induced distance operators with the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) for tackling HCW treatment technology selection problems with linguistic information. The proposed interval 2-tuple induced TOPSIS (ITI-TOPSIS) can not only model the uncertainty and diversity of the assessment information given by decision makers, but also reflect the complex attitudinal characters of decision makers and provide much more complete information for the selection of the optimum disposal alternative. Finally, an empirical example in Shanghai, China is provided to illustrate the proposed decision making method, and results show that the ITI-TOPSIS proposed in this paper can solve the problem of HCW treatment technology selection effectively.
Highlights
With the rising awareness of the environmental implications of waste disposal, the management and treatment of health-care wastes (HCWs) are gaining more attention all around the world [1,2,3,4].Health-care waste (HCW) that is improper handled and disposed of may cause environmental pollution and health problems in terms of proliferation of diseases caused by viruses and micro-organisms, as well as contamination of ground water by untreated medical waste in landfills [5,6]
The decision process to follow in the HCW treatment technology selection is similar to the classical TOPSIS process developed in [20], with the difference being that the method proposed here will employ the interval 2-tuple induced ordered weighted distance (ITIOWD) operator to calculate the separate measures of each alternative from the positive-ideal and the negative-ideal solutions
Suppose that a HCW disposal technology selection problem has l decision makers based on the ITIOWD operator, we propose an interval 2-tuple induced TOPSIS (ITI-TOPSIS)
Summary
With the rising awareness of the environmental implications of waste disposal, the management and treatment of health-care wastes (HCWs) are gaining more attention all around the world [1,2,3,4]. Dursun et al [12] proposed a fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method based on the principles of fuzzy measure and fuzzy integral to identify the most suitable HCW treatment alternative for Istanbul. MULTIMOORA, and Liu et al [18] selected the appropriate HCW treatment alternative based on a hybrid MCDM model integrating 2-tuple DEMATEL technique and fuzzy MULTIMOORA method. Based upon the above analyses, it can be seen that it is promising to extend the TOPSIS method to accommodate the interval 2-tuple linguistic environment in order to solve the problem of HCW treatment technology selection more efficiently.
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