An integrated decision-making method for locating parking centers of recyclable waste transportation vehicles

This study is motivated by a third-party logistics company in a modern city in China that manages the transportation of recyclable waste for the municipal government. Research in the area has rarely attended to the location of recyclable waste transportation vehicle parking centers (RWTVPCs). This study develops an integrated multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method through the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) approach, entropy weight (EW), and weighted aggregated sum product assessment (WASPAS) to select suitable RWTVPC sites. An interesting finding is that the MCDM method is more suitable for this task than the traditional location allocation model. A comparison of three MCDM methods verified the advantages of the proposed method in terms of stability and reliability. Moreover, we found through a sensitivity analysis that the ranking of alternatives was greatly affected by changes in the criteria weights but was not sensitive to changes in the parameters of the preferential decisions. Besides, the proposed method has advantages in terms of reducing the cost of transportation of recyclable waste and improving the efficiency of transportation. This provides a reference for the large-scale collection of urban recyclable waste. This paper provides some important implications for waste management that are useful for the implementation of the DEMATEL-EW-WASPAS method.