Medical Waste Disposal Method Selection Based on a Hierarchical Decision Model with Intuitionistic Fuzzy Relations

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2016 Sep 9;13(9):896. doi: 10.3390/ijerph13090896.

Abstract

Although medical waste usually accounts for a small fraction of urban municipal waste, its proper disposal has been a challenging issue as it often contains infectious, radioactive, or hazardous waste. This article proposes a two-level hierarchical multicriteria decision model to address medical waste disposal method selection (MWDMS), where disposal methods are assessed against different criteria as intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations and criteria weights are furnished as real values. This paper first introduces new operations for a special class of intuitionistic fuzzy values, whose membership and non-membership information is cross ratio based ]0, 1[-values. New score and accuracy functions are defined in order to develop a comparison approach for ]0, 1[-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers. A weighted geometric operator is then put forward to aggregate a collection of ]0, 1[-valued intuitionistic fuzzy values. Similar to Saaty's 1-9 scale, this paper proposes a cross-ratio-based bipolar 0.1-0.9 scale to characterize pairwise comparison results. Subsequently, a two-level hierarchical structure is formulated to handle multicriteria decision problems with intuitionistic preference relations. Finally, the proposed decision framework is applied to MWDMS to illustrate its feasibility and effectiveness.

Keywords: aggregation; intuitionistic fuzzy values; medical waste disposal; multicriteria decision making; operational laws.

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Decision Making*
  • Fuzzy Logic*
  • Hazardous Waste / adverse effects*
  • Humans
  • Medical Waste Disposal / methods*
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Reproducibility of Results

Substances

  • Hazardous Waste
  • Medical Waste Disposal