Evaluation and selection of medical tourism sites: A rough analytic hierarchy process based multi-attributive border approximation area comparison approach

This paper presents a novel multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) methodology for assessing and prioritizing medical tourism destinations in uncertain environment. A systematic evaluation and assessment method is proposed by incorporating Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Multi-Attribute Border Approximation area Comparison (MABAC) methods in rough number. Rough number effectively aggregate individual judgments of decision makers and express their true perception to handle vagueness without any prior information. Rough AHP analyzes the relative importance of criteria based on their preferences given by experts while Rough MABAC evaluates the alternative sites based on the criteria weights. Finally, an application in prioritizing different cities in India for medical tourism service is proposed to demonstrate the method. 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 comparison with rough TOPSIS and rough VIKOR.