A two-stage multi-attribute decision-making model for selecting appropriate locations of waste transfer stations in urban centers

Selecting appropriate locations for municipal solid waste (MSW) management facilities, such as transfer stations, is an important issue in rapidly developing regions. Multiple alternatives and evaluation attri-butes need to be analyzed for finalizing the locations of these facilities. Multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) approaches are found to be very effective for ranking several potential locations and hence selecting the best among them based on the identified attributes. However, conventional MADM approaches fail to find the rankings of alternatives derived from all possible combinations of these poten-tial locations. Therefore, this study presents a two-stage MADM model that also accounts for all possible combinations of locations. This study evaluates economical, environmental, social and technical attri-butes based on realistic conditions of the study area, i.e., Nashik city (India). The results provide the ranks of all possible combinations along with their probabilities of rank reversibility. The mean and standard deviation of the relative closeness are further evaluated for the top-ranking locations under distinct schemes. The present study will help stakeholders in finding suitable locations for MSW management facilities while considering economic, environmental, social and technical attributes. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.