Grey system theory in sustainable development research—a literature review (2011−2021)

Abstract

PurposeAs the grey systems theory has been widely used in the field of sustainable development (SD) research, in the following, a short literature overview will be put forward, starting from the usage of these theories in the economic development, social inclusion and environmental protection contributions to the evolving process of SD during 2011–2021. The purpose of this paper is to identify some key studies from all the SD areas in which the grey systems can be used in order to open and to bring the researchers to new domains in which they can reveal their interest and in which they can successfully use the methods offered by the grey systems theory.Design/methodology/approachUsing the search engine offered by the Google Scholar and the Web of Science (WoS), a literature review has been performed for the grey systems applications on SD research on both grey relational analysis (GRA) and grey forecasting. In addition, some grey evaluation theories – clustering evaluation models and grey target decision models – have also been presented.FindingsMany grey models are widely used in the field of SD. Compared with other methods such as grey prediction, grey evaluation and decision-making model, GRA technology is the most used method, and the research using this method is more than three times that of all other methods.Research limitations/implicationsThe present paper identifies some of the most representative examples in which the grey system theory (GST) has been used, but, in the same time, there are a lot of studies that have not been mentioned here due to the lack of space.Originality/valueThe present paper focuses on the SD applications in which GST has been successfully used, bringing to the reader a general overview on this field and, in the same time, enables new research perspectives.

Use of AHP and grey fixed weight clustering to assess the maturity level of strategic communication management in Brazilian startups

“…, 2022; Tao et al. , 2022), management, sustainable development (Hu and Liu, 2022), agricultural science (Li et al. , 2022) and many others.…”

“…Given the prevalence of uncertain systems with small samples and limited information worldwide, GS 14,1 this method proves highly effective and widely applicable (Liu et al, 2022b;Prakash et al, 2023). Thus, as argued by Li et al (2022), the emergence and development of grey systems theory has caused innovation and progress across several research areas, including engineering Tao et al, 2022), management, sustainable development (Hu and Liu, 2022), agricultural science (Li et al, 2022) and many others.…”

A novel quality risk evaluation framework for complex equipment development integrating PHFS-QFD and grey clustering

“…In such scenarios, the grey system theory proves to be highly advantageous. It stands out in handling situations with inadequate information and dealing with uncertain problems (Liu et al ., 2017, 2022; Hu and Liu, 2022; Liu et al ., 2022a, b; Tao et al. , 2022).…”

“…In such scenarios, the grey system theory proves to be highly advantageous. It stands out in handling situations with inadequate information and dealing with uncertain problems Hu and Liu, 2022;Liu et al, 2022a, b;Tao et al, 2022). The grey clustering model is one of the evaluation methods and has a wide range of applications (Delcea et al, 2022;He et al, 2022;Karimi and Yahyazade, 2022;Li et al, 2022;Luo et al, 2022;Liu et al, 2022a, b) In this stage, a grey clustering model based on mixed end-point possibility function is applied to evaluate the quality risk of systems.…”

Trends and predictions in the physical shape of Chinese preschool children from 2000 to 2020

“…GM (1, 1) model is a prediction model of grey system theory and an important branch of grey system theory with the most classic results ( 27 ). GM (1, 1) represents a Grey Model of a first-order differential equation with one variable, where G represents grey and M represents Model, the first 1 in parentheses represents the first-order differential equation, and the second 1 represents the equation with only one independent variable, GM (1, 1) has the characteristics of “less series data,” “isochronous” and “time series,” and the time series of no less than 4 data can build the prediction model ( 28 ).…”