Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Healthcare Waste Management
Summary
Healthcare waste encompasses all materials generated by medical, diagnostic and research activities that can pose risks to human health and the environment. Effective management of this waste requires the evaluation of numerous, often conflicting criteria, including technical feasibility, economic cost, environmental impact, regulatory compliance and social acceptance. Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) frameworks provide structured approaches to rank and select optimal treatment technologies, disposal locations and policy strategies under uncertainty. They integrate weighting methods to reflect stakeholder priorities, aggregation operators to synthesise expert judgments, and sensitivity analysis to gauge the robustness of outcomes. Recent advances have incorporated fuzzy-logic variants—such as intuitionistic, q-rung orthopair and Fermatean fuzzy sets—to capture ambiguous or incomplete information. Typical methods include Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), Preference Ranking Organisation Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE) and Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), often combined in hybrid models. These tools enable decision-makers to balance cost, risk and sustainability goals, ranging from selection of autoclaving or incineration technologies to siting of disposal centres and integration of circular-economy principles. Practical applications span municipal hospitals, large-scale testing facilities and emergency response to pandemics, demonstrating global relevance and adaptability to resource constraints.
Research from Nature Portfolio
Recent studies have introduced hybrid MCDM methods that fuse complementary ranking techniques to address the location selection problem for healthcare waste disposal centres. A combined outranking and similarity-based framework integrates fuzzy-AHP for criteria weighting with a dual-method scoring mechanism to evaluate candidate sites against economic, environmental, social, technical and geological criteria. This approach identifies transportation cost, operating cost and pollution risk as leading factors in real-world case analyses, and yields a transparent ranking of disposal locations. By embedding fuzzy theory to model parameter uncertainty, the method offers decision-makers enhanced confidence in site recommendations and helps align waste management infrastructure with public-health and environmental objectives.
Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Healthcare Waste Management publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in multi-criteria decision making for healthcare waste management across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM): A set of formal methods for evaluating and ranking alternatives based on multiple, often conflicting criteria.
Fuzzy set: A mathematical framework that represents imprecise information through membership degrees rather than binary classifications.
Q-rung orthopair fuzzy set: An extension of fuzzy sets allowing independent degrees of membership and non-membership with a flexible uncertainty parameter.
TOPSIS: Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution, which ranks alternatives by distance to ideal and anti-ideal points.
PROMETHEE: Preference Ranking Organisation Method for Enrichment Evaluations, an outranking approach based on pairwise comparisons and preference functions.
DEMATEL: Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory, a method for mapping and analysing causal relationships among evaluation criteria.
Sensitivity analysis: Evaluation of how changes in input parameters affect the stability and reliability of decision outcomes.
References
- Assessment of bio-medical waste disposal techniques using interval-valued q-rung orthopair fuzzy soft set based EDAS method. Artificial Intelligence Review (2024).
- Evaluating and prioritizing the healthcare waste disposal center locations using a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making method. Scientific Reports (2023).
- Prioritizing healthcare waste disposal methods considering environmental health using an enhanced multi-criteria decision-making method. Environmental Pollutants and Bioavailability (2023).
- Sustainable Medical Waste Management Using an Intuitionistic Fuzzy-Based Decision Support System. Sustainability (2023).
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