COVID-19 medical waste transportation risk evaluation integrating type-2 fuzzy total interpretive structural modeling and Bayesian network

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2022.118885Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The IT2FNS-TISM is used to analyze interrelationships among risks.

  • A defuzzified relationship matrix calculation method is proposed in IT2FNS-TISM.

  • The priority of identified risk is determined using hybrid fuzzy BN method.

  • The validity of method is tested by a real COVID-19 medical waste transportation.

Abstract

With the amount of medical waste rapidly increasing since the corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, medical waste treatment risk evaluation has become an important task. The transportation of medical waste is an essential process of medical waste treatment. This paper aims to develop an integrated model to evaluate COVID-19 medical waste transportation risk by integrating an extended type-2 fuzzy total interpretive structural model (TISM) with a Bayesian network (BN). First, an interval type-2 fuzzy based transportation risk rating scale is introduced to help experts express uncertain evaluation information, in which a new double alpha-cut method is developed for the defuzzification of the interval type-2 fuzzy numbers (IT2FNs). Second, TISM is combined with IT2FNs to construct a hierarchical structural model of COVID-19 medical waste transportation risk factors under a high uncertain environment; a new bidirectional extraction method is proposed to describe the hierarchy of risk factors more reasonably and accurately. Third, the BN is integrated with IT2FNs to make a comprehensive medical waste transportation risk evaluation, including identifying the sensitive factors and diagnosing the event's causation. Then, a case study of COVID-19 medical waste transportation is displayed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Further, a comparison of the proposed model with the traditional TISM and BN model is conducted to stress the advantages of the proposed model.

Keywords

Risk evaluation
Medical waste transportation
Interval type-2 fuzzy set
Total interpretive structural modeling
Bayesian network

Data availability

Data will be made available on request.

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