title: An integrated decision making approach for assessing healthcare waste treatment technologies from a multiple stakeholder.
abstract: With increased worldwide awareness of environmental issues, healthcare waste (HCW) management has received much attention from both researchers and practitioners over the past decade. The task of selecting the optimum treatment technology for HCWs is a challenging decision making problem involving conflicting evaluation criteria and multiple stakeholders. In this paper, we develop an integrated decision making framework based on cloud model and MABAC method for evaluating and selecting the best HCW treatment technology from a multiple stakeholder perspective. The introduced framework deals with uncertain linguistic assessments of alternatives by using interval 2-tuple linguistic variables, determines decision makers' relative weights based on the uncertainty and divergence degrees of every decision maker, and obtains the ranking of all HCW disposal alternatives with the aid of an extended MABAC method. Finally, an empirical example from Shanghai, China, is provided to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Results indicate that the methodology being proposed is more suitable and effective to handle the HCW treatment technology selection problem under vague and uncertain information environment.
authors.affiliation: School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, PR China.
authors.forename: Hua
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.affiliation: School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, PR China; School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, PR China. Electronic address: huchenliu@foxmail.com.
authors.forename: Hu-Chen
authors.initials: HC
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Zhoupu Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai University of Medicine & Health Sciences, Shanghai 201318, PR China.
authors.forename: Ping
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, PR China.
authors.forename: Xue-Guo
authors.initials: XG
authors.lastname: Xu
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002681:China; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D003657:Decision Making; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D017744:Medical Waste Disposal / Q000379:methods*; D015233:Models, Statistical; D013672:Technology / Q000379:methods*; D035501:Uncertainty; D018505:Waste Management / Q000379:methods
chemical_list: D017744:Medical Waste Disposal
keywords: Cloud model; HCW treatment technology; Healthcare waste management; MABAC method