Abstract
The industries have created threat to the present environment through their manufacturing methods. Moreover, the excessive utilization of natural resources have led to scarcity and triggered danger for the future generations. So there exists a vital need for the modern companies to renovate their manufacturing technologies. Thus, a new concept of manufacturing process known as sustainable manufacturing has been introduced and it gained great importance in the present scenario. Sustainable manufacturing means the production of goods in such a way that it utilizes minimum natural resources and produces safer, cleaner, and environment-friendly products at an affordable cost. The purpose of this article is to assess the sustainability level of a manufacturing organization taking into consideration various factors needed for insuring sustainability. During the course of this research, a sustainability model was developed using fuzzy logic and the sustainability index was calculated. Manual calculation of sustainability index consumes more time and it is mistake prone. So, in order to avoid such inadequacies, a computerbased decision support system was developed designated as fuzzy-logic-based sustainability evaluation decision support system. The system calculates the fuzzy logic sustainability index, Euclidean distance, and fuzzy performance importance index. This model will help the companies to analyze various aspects of sustainability within their organization and work toward further improvement of it.
Introduction
The modern manufacturing organizations are forced to adopt sustainable manufacturing principles due to regulations enforced by Government policies. As a sequel to it, the need for developing environmentally friendlier products arises. Sustainability includes environmental, economic, and social dimensions. Hence, the assessment of sustainability must be a comprehensive and holistic approach. Due to the drawbacks associated with traditional methods, the usage of fuzzy methods gains importance. Hence, the requirement for fuzzy-based sustainability evaluation was realized. Due to the complexity associated with fuzzy-based sustainability evaluation, fuzzy-logicbased sustainability evaluation decision support system (FLBSE-DSS) was designed and deployed in our study. The novelty of the study reported in this article is the development of exclusive DSS for sustainability evaluation in a fuzzy environment. Also, the practical feasibility of the developed DSS was test implemented in a real time manufacturing environment. The conceptual features and working mechanism of FLBSE-DSS will be presented in this article.
Conclusions
Sustainable development insures sustainable, long-term, and competitive benefits for manufacturing organizations. In this context, the evaluation of sustainability is very much needed. In order to systematically compute and analyze sustainability of the case organization, FLBSEDSS was developed. The developed FLBSE-DSS computes the sustainability index of the organization and generates FPII for various sustainability attributes. In this present study, FLSI of the organization was found to be (2.938, 4.396, 5.869). Using Euclidean distance approach, the organization was found to be sustainable. Besides determining sustainability index and Euclidean distance, DSS also identifies weaker sustainability attributes like air quality effects, 6R concepts, green manufacturing, and carbon foot-print as weaker areas. After mitigating the weaker areas, suitable initiatives were derived and subjected to implementation in the case organization.
