Model framework to construct a single aggregate sustainability indicator: an application to the biodiesel supply chain

Santos, Silvio Francisco dos; Brandi, H. S.

doi:10.1007/s10098-015-0919-8

Cited by 25 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…For the purpose of illustration, the following examples will be applied for the results of Germany and Brazil. In the previous study of Santos and Brandi (2015b), these two countries ranked the best and the worst among the five largest biodiesel producer plus China. In that work, uncertainty evaluation was not considered.…”

Section: Illustrative Examplesmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…The reference values were taken as the best (more sustainable) results of the indicators across the countries under comparison (see sources in Box 1, Appendix), according to the procedure describe by Santos and Brandi (2015b). The value of the indicator x i (Road sector diesel fuel consumption per capita) for China is strongly influenced by the population of that country.…”

Section: Illustrative Examplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, Santos and Brandi (2015b) proposed a model framework that may be applied to study sustainability of a variety of systems and to aggregate economic, social and environmental into a single sustainability metric. It uses statistical tools to group the indicators into a valid set, according to their similarity using the inherent statistical information in their structure.…”

Section: Modeling Sustainability Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…. ; n ð Þdescribing the behavior of the system S. In order to be a good representation of the real sustainability system, the model system strongly depends on the quality of its indicators (Santos and Brandi 2015b). This set of indicators must provide an adequate description of the sustainability conditions of a particular system.…”

Section: Sustainability Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To illustrate the application of the framework, we chose the integration and logistic infrastructure (ILI), one of the six dimensions of the biodiesel supply chain (Santos et al 2014) and the same set of indicators of Santos and Brandi (2015b). Table 1 shows the mean values, X i , uncertainties, u(x i ), and reference values, r i , of the time series of n indicators x i of j(= 6) countries.…”

Section: Illustrative Examplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Introducing measurement science into sustainability systems

Brandi

Santos

2015

Clean Techn Environ Policy

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In this paper, we discuss perspectives of adopting procedures of metrology, the science of measurements, into sustainability assessments. We present an overview of general concepts of system theory, sustainability, and sustainability metrics. We use these concepts together with the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM) metrological approach to include estimation of uncertainties and sensitivity analysis in the model framework to construct aggregated sustainability indicators proposed by Santos and Brandi. To illustrate the method, we apply Canberra distance to study the sustainability of the integration and logistic infrastructure dimension of the biodiesel supply chain in Brazil and Germany. Sustainability has been embodied into government, industries and corporations' policies through standards, conformity assessment, and metrology. This increases the need for sound measurements to address sustainability. To perform sensitivity analysis, we propose an expression to evaluate changes in the sustainability index due to variations in a given indicator, generalizing the linear approximation of the GUM framework. We concluded that metrological procedures can be applied to estimate uncertainties of sustainability systems and their components. Adopting metrological procedures may be an important step to harmonize approaches involving measurements in sustainability systems. Sensitivity analysis provides information about the influence on the sustainability index due to variations of indicators from sustainability systems.

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Section: Illustrative Examplesmentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Illustrative Examplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modeling Sustainability Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sustainability Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Illustrative Examplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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