A hybrid data envelopment analysis and multi‐attribute decision making approach to sustainability assessment

Abstract

The concept of sustainability consists of three main dimensions: environmental, techno‐economic, and social. Measuring the sustainability status of a system or technology is a significant challenge, especially when it needs to consider a large number of attributes in each dimension of sustainability. In this study, we first propose a hybrid approach, involving data envelopment analysis (DEA) and a multi‐attribute decision making (MADM) methodologies, for computing an index for each dimension of sustainability, and then we define the overall sustainability index as the mean of the three measured indexes. Towards this end, we define new concepts of efficiency and cross‐efficiency of order (p, q) where p and q are the number of inputs and outputs, respectively. For a given (p, q), we address the problem of finding efficiency of order (p, q) by developing a novel DEA‐based selecting method. Finally, we define the sustainability index as a weighted sum of all possible cross‐efficiencies of order (p, q). Form a computational viewpoint, the proposed selecting model significantly decreases the computational burden in comparison with the successive solving of traditional DEA models. A case study of the electricity‐generation technologies in the United Kingdom is taken as a real‐world example to illustrate the potential application of our method.

Efficiency of Digital Economy in the Context of Sustainable Development: DEA-Tobit Approach

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Efficiency Evaluation of Regional Environmental Management Systems in Russia Using Data Envelopment Analysis

“…Martín-Gamboa et al [35] presented a review of life cycle approaches coupled with data envelopment analysis within multicriteria decision analysis for sustainability assessment of energy systems. Keshavarz and Toloo [36] proposed a hybrid DEA and multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) approach to sustainability assessment.…”

New data envelopment analysis models for assessing sustainability Part 2: A static data envelopment analysis approach

“…The second article “A hybrid data envelopment analysis and multi‐attribute decision making approach to sustainability assessment” by Keshavarz and Toloo () considers the three main elements of sustainability: environmental, techno‐economic and social. They then discuss the challenges in measuring the many attributes of these elements before proposing a hybrid approach for analysis.…”