A novel holistic approach for solving the multi-criteria transshipment problem for infectious waste management

Effective transshipment network is currently recognized as an important success determinant for most manufacturing organizations, because the transshipment management has significant impact on cost and environmental impact. Due to the complexity of the multi-criteria transshipment problem for infectious waste management (IWM) for this case, forty hospitals and three candidate disposal municipalities in Northeastern Thailand, a novel holistic approach (combination of fuzzy AHP, transshipment model and DEA) was developed for solving this problem. We first utilized the fuzzy AHP technique to calculate the location weights of each candidate disposal municipalities. Secondly, a new cost-based transshipment model was formulated and solved in order to provide the set of feasible solutions. These solutions can be viewed as decision making units (DMUs), inputs and outputs. Finally, DEA-CCR model was applied to calculate the efficiency scores of candidate DMUs. The study results demonstrated that the proposed holistic approach can help decision makers (DMs) to choose a suitable transshipment network for IWM. The major advantage of the proposed holistic approach is that both costs and environmental impacts under constraints are focused on simultaneously. Future work will apply the developed approach with other real-world complex problems to enhance the validity of the research output further. For large-size transshipment problems in which an exact solution cannot be found, meta-heuristics must be applied.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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