A gate-to-gate sustainability assessment method for the Malaysian food manufacturing industry
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Date
2019
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Abstract
Activities of today's manufacturing industries have significant impact on all three dimensions of sustainability (environment, economy and society). Although, methods or frameworks have been developed for sustainability assessment, only limited numbers consider all the three dimensions of sustainability. There is rarely a method that considers both stochastic and fuzzy uncertainties simultaneously. Moreover, there is no such method that is based on a weighted and comprehensive set of sustainability indicators for the Malaysian food manufacturing industry. Although food manufacturing is a key industry in Malaysia from the economy and food security viewpoints, it lags behind in applying sustainability practices in its operations. Thus, the development of a comprehensive and integrated stochastic-fuzzy sustainability assessment method for the Malaysian food manufacturing industry is the main objective of this research. This method employed 57 weighted sustainability indicators for all three dimensions of sustainability (triple-bottom line concept of sustainability). The Delphi method was used for the development of these indicators and their weights. The new integrated method included both quantitative and qualitative indicators to perform a systematic gate-to-gate sustainability assessment. This has made it more useful for internal decision making at industry and plant levels. Monte Carlo simulation and fuzzy logic were used to address stochastic and fuzzy uncertainties respectively in an integrated way. Based on stochastic and fuzzy modeling, an overall unit-less sustainability index was generated to evaluate the performance level of sustainability. The Crystal Ball software for Monte Carlo simulation and Fuzzy Logic toolbox of Matlab for fuzzy logic evaluation were used. The applicability of the developed method was demonstrated using two case studies in the Malaysian food manufacturing industry. The analysis showed that the first case company has an "average" sustainability performance with a sustainability index of 0.42. The second company with a sustainability index of 0.43 also falled into the "average" performance range. The case studies and validation process showed that the developed method was useful for evaluating sustainability performance within a system containing complicated uncertainties. Overall, this research has contributed in expanding the knowledge on the sustainable manufacturing and sustainability assessment, and provided practical guidelines for practitioners to evaluate, predict, and improve the sustainability performance of their companies using the developed assessment method.
Description
Thesis (PhD. (Mechanical Engineering))
Keywords
Manufacturing industries--Economic aspects, Manufacturing industries--Environmental aspects, Sustainable development, Stochastic analysis