(521e) Technology Evaluation and Decision Making for Sustainability Enhancement of Industrial Systems Under Uncertainty

Depletion of natural resources, environmental pressure, economic globalization, etc., demand seriously industrial organizations to ensure that their development is sustainable. Technology based sustainability enhancement is one of key approaches for industrial sustainability realization.  However, identification of effective technologies for a given industrial system could be a combinatorial problem; this is especially true when multiple technologies are considered for adoption together.  On the other hand, if the available data and information about the industrial system and the known technologies are incomplete, imprecise, and uncertain, the technology identification could be even more difficult. 

In this paper, we introduce a simple approach for systematic sustainability assessment of industrial systems and technologies, and effective system sustainability enhancement under uncertainty.  An industrial system can be an industrial zone, corporate, company, or plant of any complexity.  We assume that the industrial organization has set a strategic plan that includes detailed development goals of economic, environmental, and social sustainability with a budget set aside for goal achievement.  It is known that a number of technologies are seemingly promising for sustainability enhancement.  A challenge is how to derive efficiently the most suitable solutions for identification of superior sustainability technologies. 

The technology-assisted sustainability enhancement methodology to be introduced will consist of a sustainability assessment method for evaluating the performance of industrial systems as well as technologies, and a sustainability decision making and analysis method for identifying superior technology combinations for achieving the sustainability goals of industrial systems. The interval parameter based information processing and decision making permit the acceptance of uncertain information that could be available at the best.  The logically designed solution identification procedure can make the combinatorial problem solved efficiently through reducing the solution space stage-wisely using different criteria set by the strategic plan.  The identified solutions are also sufficiently detailed which can greatly facilitate the industrial organization in final decision making.   The methodology is general that can be applied to the sustainability enhancement problems of any size and scope, and the efficacy of the approach is illustrated through a sustainability development problem about regional biodiesel manufacturing improvement.