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An Optimization Model for Sustainability Program

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Abstract

A sustainability program is about implementing essential sustainability practices at various intensities that will not harm people because of firm actions. This paper formulates an optimization model to identify an optimal intensity of implementation of selected sustainability practices referred as sustainability program for maximising manufacturing industry sustainability performance for a known set of budgetary and minimum thresholds constraints with respect to economic, social and socio-economic criteria. Besides modelling the paper proposes a random search procedure embedding the NN to determine the optimal sustainability program and explains the usefulness with a sample problem. Sensitivity analysis is carried out to understand the behaviour of the model. It is observed that the sustainability performances depend on the constraints such as budget limitation and threshold values of performance criterion.

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Abbreviations

B:

Budget

CPI:

Composite Performance Index

E:

Economic performance in percentage

\( it _{max}\) :

Maximum iteration

LR:

Learning rate

MSE:

Mean square error

N:

Number of neurons

S:

Social performance in percentage

SE:

Socio-economic performance in percentage

Z:

Overall performance score

\(Z_{opt}\) :

Optimal performance

\(B_{max}\) :

Maximum budgetary limit

\( CPI _j\) :

Composite Performance Index (industry wise)

\( CPI _j^{A}\) :

CPI score of jth industry derived with MADM approach

\( CPI _j^{E}\) :

CPI score of jth industry predicted through NN Model

\(C_{m_p}\) :

Operational cost of pth sustainable practice to its mode m

\(E_{\mathrm{min}}\) :

Minimum threshold of economic performance in percentage

i:

Performance dimension

I:

Number of performance dimensions

it:

Initial iteration

j:

Industry identifier (alternative)

J:

No. of industries

m:

Modes

M:

Number of modes

p:

Practices

P:

Number of practices

\( PWP _{ij}^A\) :

Actual percent weighted performance ith dimension of jth industry

\( PWP _{ij}^E\) :

Estimated percent weighted performance ith dimension of jth industry

\( SE _{\mathrm{min}}\) :

Minimum threshold of socio-economic performance in percentage

\(S_i^k\) :

Performance score for ith dimension to its kth level

\(S_{m_p}^i\) :

Performance scores for sustainable program,

\(S_j^i\) :

Performance score for jth industry to ith dimension

\(S_{\mathrm{min}}\) :

Minimum threshold of social performance in percentage

\(W_i\) :

Weights of criterion

\(X_{m_p}^{Opt}\) :

Optimal sustainable program

\(X_{m_{p}}\) :

Binary variable

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, 625 015, India

    N. Jawahar

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, 625 015, India

    G. Satish Pandian

  3. Department of Decision and Information Sciences, Charlton College of Business, University of Massachusetts, North Dartmouth, MA, 02747-2300, USA

    Angappa Gunasekaran

  4. Nottingham University Business School, Ningbo, 315100, China

    Nachiappan Subramanian

Authors
  1. N. Jawahar
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  2. G. Satish Pandian
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  3. Angappa Gunasekaran
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  4. Nachiappan Subramanian
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nachiappan Subramanian.

Appendix: survey instrument

Appendix: survey instrument

See Tables 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19.

Respondent’s details

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Table 14 General (A): company details
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Table 15 (B) Categorization of product/process details
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Table 16 (C) Environmental/sustainable practices
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Table 17 (D) Economic performance
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Table 18 (E) Societal performance
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Table 19 (F) Socio-economic performance
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Jawahar, N., Satish Pandian, G., Gunasekaran, A. et al. An Optimization Model for Sustainability Program. Ann Oper Res 250, 389–425 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-015-1928-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-015-1928-z

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