Selection of Waste Disposal Firms Using Grey Theory Based Multi-criteria Decision Making Technique

Abstract

In developing countries, very few methods of medical disposal and treatments are used which lead to adverse impacts to public health. In healthcare facilities, the issue of infectious waste generated has become the big concern today for hospital authority. To ensure the proper disposal of the medical wastes has become the big challenge for the hospital waste management and they think that to outsource the waste disposal process is the best option. Hence, to ensure the proper hygiene environment and to minimize the cost of operations, the trends in outsourcing the waste disposal process is increasing. But, outsourcing process is not easy for the hospitals authorities as it is very difficult to select the best waste disposal firm, which takes care of all the government regulations and at the same time is cost effective. Since selection of healthcare waste disposal firms is based on the evaluation of various attributes of each alternative, therefore this problem is a multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) problem. Till now, so many methods like analytical hierarchy process (AHP); analytical network process (ANP); data envelopment analysis (DEA); fuzzy theory; mathematical programming, etc. have been used by various researchers to select the best alternate out of the available choices. The above-mentioned techniques either used the precise values of the attributes or in terms of membership functions. However, in case of uncertainty these techniques failed to implement. Hence, this paper reports the implementation of grey theory to choose the appropriate healthcare waste disposal firm with uncertain information. This paper proposed a MADM model based on grey theory to select the optimal waste disposal firm and finally, the proposed model has been applied to select the best healthcare waste disposal firm.

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