Assessment of healthcare waste treatment alternatives using an integrated decision support framework

Abstract

Healthcare waste (HCW) management has become a major environmental and public-health concern especially in developing countries, and therefore, it has been receiving increasing attention from both industrial practitioners and researcher in recent years. Selection of the optimal treatment technology for HCW is regarded as an intricate multi-criteria decision-making problem involving conflicting and intertwined qualitative as well as quantitative evaluative criteria. To address this decision problem, we develop an integrated decision support framework based on decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), intuitionistic fuzzy ANP, and intuitionistic fuzzy AHP. The DEMATEL method determines the influences of main factors and criteria and produces a network relationship map while the ANP method calculates the degree of interrelationship among evaluative criteria and obtains their relative weights. The AHP method assesses the HCW treatment alternatives over evaluative criteria. The experts’ opinions are collected in form of intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations as they are effective in capturing uncertainty and hesitancy involved in decision-makers’ judgment. We also develop a priority method to derive nonfuzzy weights from the intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations. To validate the feasibility of the proposed approach, a case study is carried out on the selection of optimum HCW treatment technology for Chhattisgarh, India. The analyses of the results indicate that the proposed integrated multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) framework effectively handles the issue of HCW treatment technology selection in uncertain environments.