Abstract
Healthcare waste (HCW) management is an intricate issue upon which numerous factors, such as technical, economic, environmental, and social factors, have an impact. A determination on the best treatment method for HCW management can be viewed as a challenging multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem in which various options and evaluation criteria are considered. One critical concern when assessing HCW treatment (HCWT) methods is the representation and treatment of dubious data. In this paper, we present a q-rung orthopair fuzzy full consistency method double normalization-based multi-aggregation methodology called q-ROF-FUCOM-DNMA to solve MCDM problems with q-rung orthopair fuzzy information (q-ROFI). In the proposed approach, criteria weights are estimated through the full consistency method (FUCOM) and a ranking of the alternatives is obtained through the double-normalization-based multi-aggregation (DNMA) method with q-ROFI. A HCWT method assessment issue was considered in order to clarify the relevance of the proposed approach. Five HCWT methods, including chemical disinfection, microwave disinfection, incineration, autoclaving (steam sterilization), and reverse polymerization, were considered as alternatives. The results show that autoclaving (steam sterilization) is the most efficient HCWT method. Furthermore, we performed a sensitivity analysis to determine the stability of the proposed approach. Additionally, we compared the presented approach with existing methods.