Application of interval 2-tuple linguistic MULTIMOORA method for health-care waste treatment technology evaluation and selection

The management of health-care waste (HCW) is a major challenge for municipalities, particularly in the cities of developing countries. Selection of the best treatment technology for HCW can be viewed as a complicated multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem which requires consideration of a number of alternatives and conflicting evaluation criteria. Additionally, decision makers often use different linguistic term sets to express their assessments because of their different backgrounds and preferences, some of which may be imprecise, uncertain and incomplete. In response, this paper proposes a modified MULTIMOORA method based on interval 2-tuple linguistic variables (named ITL-MULTIMOORA) for evaluating and selecting HCW treatment technologies. In particular, both subjective and objective importance coefficients of criteria are taken into consideration in the developed approach in order to conduct a more effective analysis. Finally, an empirical case study in Shanghai, the most crowded metropolis of China, is presented to demonstrate the proposed method, and results show that the proposed ITL-MULTIMOORA can solve the HCW treatment technology selection problem effectively under uncertain and incomplete information environment. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.