Antifragile, sustainable and agile healthcare waste chain network design by considering blockchain, resiliency, robustness and risk

This study focuses on the most critical issue facing the COVID-19 pandemic: Healthcare Waste Management (HWM). With the increase in patient numbers, effective HWM becomes critical. This research focuses on the framework of a Healthcare Waste Chain Network (HWCND), which includes essential components including health centres, waste segregation, Waste Purchase Contractors, and landfills. We provide a new robust stochastic optimization approach incorporating risk criteria, specifically the entropic value at risk, to deal with uncertainty, risk interruptions, and demand fluctuations. Furthermore, this study incorporates antifragility, sustainability, and agility principles into the HWCND framework, which includes Blockchain Technology (BCT), flexible capacity, CO2 emissions, energy consumption, and population risk restrictions. Notably, this is the first attempt to combine these notions in the context of HWCND. The results show that introducing antifragility reduces the cost function by about 5.85% compared to scenarios without antifragility. Furthermore, increasing the conservatism coefficient and confidence level alters the cost function, causing it to trend upward. Furthermore, the agility coefficient has a 5.3% influence on the linear cost function. Finally, the magnitude of the challenge influences solution time and costs.