A fuzzy logic-based tool for the assessment of corporate sustainability: A case study in the food machinery industry

Abstract

This paper develops a quantitative tool for the assessment of sustainability at the company's level, taking into account its three key perspectives, i.e., economic, environmental and social. The proposed framework is grounded on fuzzy logic and in particular on a monotonic hierarchical fuzzy inference tool, as an effective means to gather the judgements and scores against the key performance indicators (KPIs) of each sustainability perspective into an aggregated index. In developing the fuzzy inference tool, we also solve some typical issues related to the assessment of sustainability, e.g., the identification of benchmark values to rate the company's performance against each sustainability KPI. The architecture of the fuzzy inference tool was embodied in an ad hoc software developed in Microsoft ExcelTM (Microsoft Corporation, Albuquerque, NM, USA), which makes it easy to use the proposed framework in practical situations. The potential of the software tool developed is illustrated by means of a case study, targeting a food machinery company, for which the overall evaluation of sustainability is carried out.