A social sustainability assessment model for manufacturing systems based on ergonomics and fuzzy inference system

Abstract

Economy, environment and society are the three pillars of sustainability. Sustainability assessment is a critical tool for analyzing and improving sustainability performance of manufacturing systems. However, most previous research has either focused exclusively on the environmental dimension, or considered the three pillars together, thus being too broad in social indicators. Research gaps exist in studies on the social dimension of sustainability. This paper presents a social sustainability assessment framework from the perspective of ergonomics. The proposed assessment framework consists of three aspects, i.e., work task, work environment and human-machine interaction. A novel weighted Mamdani fuzzy inference system (FIS) is designed to obtain a social sustainability score, which is further translated into a social sustainability index.