Evaluation and selection of Medical Tourism sites: A rough AHP based MABAC approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel decision-making framework combining rough AHP and rough MABAC methods to evaluate and prioritize medical tourism destinations under uncertainty, demonstrated through a case study in India.

Contribution

It presents a new integrated MCDM approach using rough numbers for better handling vagueness in medical tourism site selection.

Findings

The methodology effectively ranks healthcare cities in India.

Rough AHP and MABAC improve decision robustness under uncertainty.

The approach is validated with criteria from established literature.

Abstract

In this paper, a novel multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) methodology is presented for assessing and prioritizing medical tourism destinations in uncertain environment. A systematic evaluation and assessment method is proposed by integrating rough number based AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and rough number based MABAC (Multi-Attributive Border Approximation area Comparison). Rough number is used to aggregate individual judgments and preferences to deal with vagueness in decision making due to limited data. Rough AHP analyzes the relative importance of criteria based on their preferences given by experts. Rough MABAC evaluates the alternative sites based on the criteria weights. The proposed methodology is explained through a case study considering different cities for healthcare service in India. The validity of the obtained ranking for the given decision making problem is established by testing criteria proposed by Wang and Triantaphyllou (2008) along with further analysis and discussion.