Regional hospital solid waste assessment using the evidential reasoning approach

Abstract

Hospital solid waste assessment is regularly characterized by a large number of known criteria that are both qualitative and quantitative in nature. The qualitative criteria can only be assessed by human judgments, which predictably engage a variety of uncertainties such as fuzziness and ignorance. Therefore, hospital solid waste assessments need to be analyzed and modeled using approaches that can handle uncertainties. The evidential reasoning (ER) approach can be utilized for such an analysis. In this paper, perhaps for the first time, the ER approach is applied to regional hospital solid waste assessment. The assessment criteria are characterized by a set of assessment grades assumed to be commonly exclusive and communally exhaustive. All assessment information, incomplete or complete, qualitative or quantitative, and imprecise or precise, are modeled using a cohesive belief structure. The ER approach will be used to aggregate multiple hospital solid waste assessment criteria, resulting in distributed assessment for each alternative. The proposed methodology is applied for regional hospital solid waste assessment in the province of Khuzestan, Iran.