An integrated qualitative group decision-making method for assessing health-care waste treatment technologies based on linguistic terms with weakened hedges

The assessment of the treatment technologies is a vital point for health care waste (HCW) man-agement. The assessment process is regarded as a multi-attribute group decision-making problem. Considering individual knowledge backgrounds and psychological preferences, and various uncertainty factors which are difficult to describe numerical and precisely, experts often portray their individual assessments by employing qualitative expressions. Linguistic term with weakened hedge (LTWH) is an effective tool to quantify the qualitative information. Additionally, the Bonferroni mean (BM) can capture the interrelationship between input data and the combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) method could produce reliable outcomes. In this paper, we extend the BM operator into the LTWH environment and propose the linguistic term with weakened hedge BM (LTWHBM) operator and the weighted version, i.e., LTWHWBM, to depict the indeterminacy in the HCW management and cope with assessment of the treatment technology problems based on the developed novel operational rules of LTWHs. Various properties and special cases of these operators are investigated in detail. Furthermore, we design a LTWHWBM based CoCoSo group decision-making model, herein the LTWHWBM operator is employed to integrate individual experts' preferences and the extend CoCoSo method is utilized to yield the ranking of alternatives. Ultimately, a case study concerning the assessment of the HCW treatment technologies is performed. The feasibility and favorable characteristics of the established model are justified by the comparisons with several prevailing methodologies and sensitivity analyses.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.