Treffer: A comprehensive decision-making framework to configure a viable healthcare waste management system considering pollution risk: a case study.

In recent years, designing an efficient healthcare waste management system is known as one of the leading environmental issues and it is one of the critical challenges for the related managers. In this regard, due to the importance of proper management of this waste and despite the existence of a significant number of studies, some gaps are still observed in this field. In this regard, to bridge these gaps, this study develops a decision-making framework to configure a healthcare waste chain by considering the viability dimensions and the Internet of Things application. To do this, a scenario-based multi-objective model is proposed that simultaneously considers the sustainability, digitalization, agility, and resiliency aspects. In this study, to measure the pollution risk, the failure mode and effects analysis method is employed. Then, the proposed mathematical model is solved using the Chebyshev multi-choice goal programming with utility function. Overall, the main contribution of this work is to design an Internet of Things-enabled healthcare waste chain considering the viability dimensions and pollution risk for the first time. The results showed that employing the Internet of Things can significantly reduce the pollution risk. Also, according to the achieved results, the visibility of the waste chain was significantly enhanced when the blockchain-based information-sharing system was established. Moreover, the results of the sensitivity show that an increase in the rate of disruption leads to a 28% increase in total costs, a 15% increase in environmental impacts, and a 22% decrease in visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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