A Soft Computing Framework to Support Consumers in Obtaining Sustainable Appliances from the Market

Abstract

Currently, sustainability is considered a priority by society, with the household appliances being one of the economic sectors involved in achieving sustainability. However, the existence of several issues (e.g., energy and water consumption, reliability, initial cost, and illuminance, among others) together with the diversity of brands and models on the market, make the consumer’s decisions regarding sustainable options difficult, according to their concerns and related to each sustainability dimension (economic, environmental, and social). By combining evolutionary algorithms (EA) with multicriteria techniques, it is possible to achieve sustainable solutions for the consumer based on their requirements. In this paper, a method is presented to support the consumer by obtaining a set of sustainable household appliances on the market that suit their preferences, concerns, and needs. By using a case study to apply the approach developed here, a set of sustainable appliances from the market is obtained, where several benefits are achieved (e.g., energy and water consumption savings, avoidance of CO2 emissions) during the lifecycle of each appliance, chosen from the appliance’s industry.

Integrating Business, Social, and Environmental Goals in Open Innovation through Partner Selection

“…Additionally, and given the requirements within organizations on behalf of sustainable development (e.g., social and environmental responsibility), there are limited approaches that can support managers to perform a balanced assessment between the criteria, regarding the three known dimensions of sustainability, namely, economic, social, and environmental [15][16][17].…”

“…Economic: Concerns all the criteria that might impact the CN's economic and financial viability, which includes issues mainly related with the organization's economic wellbeing [15], namely, facility location [37,42,56], supply chain channels (distribution points, transportation modes, etc.) [42], scale (available) of operations [56,69], operation costs [75,76], financial situation and credibility [37], capacity of facilities [42], and reliability of feedstock supply [15], among other criteria.…”

“…Environmental: Concerns all the criteria that might impact the CN's environmental viability [15], which includes issues mainly related with the organization's environmental responsibility [75], namely, self-energy greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions [15,40,73], soil and water quality [40], circular economy policies [67], and environment standards accreditation [15,73], among other criteria.…”