Health-Care Waste Treatment Technology Selection Using the Interval 2-Tuple Induced TOPSIS Method

Chao Lu, Jian-Xin You, Hu-Chen Liu and Ping Li
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Chao Lu: School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
Jian-Xin You: School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
Hu-Chen Liu: School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
Ping Li: Zhoupu Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai University of Medicine & Health Sciences, Shanghai 201318, China

IJERPH, 2016, vol. 13, issue 6, 1-16

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.

Keywords: health-care waste management; interval 2-tuple; TOPSIS; distance measures; HCW treatment technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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