A novel framework for selecting sustainable healthcare waste treatment technologies under Z-number environment

Abstract

Health-care waste (HCW) management has been regarded as an increasingly important issue in environmental protection. The evaluation and selection of HCW treatment technologies are essential in HCW management. In this paper, we present a novel group decision making framework based on Z-numbers and the TODIM method to synthesise the opinions of the experts and assist them in selecting an optimal HCW treatment technology. This framework comprises three phases, namely, (I) transformation of decision-making information, (II) determination of the criteria weights and (III) ranking of the alternatives. It can take advantage of Z-numbers to express the opinions of experts and to analyse their reliability. The TODIM method captures the bounded rationality of these experts and enhances the reasonability of the selection. An illustrative example is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework.

Keywords:

• Health care waste management
• multiple criteria group decision making
• TODIM
• Z-numbers
• Linguistic terms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71971223, 71790615, 71991465) and the Consulting Project of Chinese Academy of Engineering (No. 2020-XY-36).