Cleaner production assessment is a measure of the state and level of cleaner production, also a necessary method of promoting cleaner production in enterprises. For the purpose of the improvement of cleaner production of enterprises, improved Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model and grey relational analysis (GRA) are used to assess the same nature of the three enterprises of one group with seven quantitative indicators concordant with the Cleaner Production Report. The results are consistent with the clean production reports from three enterprises, which show that the integrated methods are feasible and objective, and can be used as a tool for internal cleaner production assessment.
This paper outlines a concurrent design methodology for multidisciplinary systems, which employs tools of fuzzy theory for the tradeoff in the design space. This methodology enhances communication between designers from various disciplines through introducing the universal notion of satisfaction and expressing the behaviour of multidisciplinary systems using the notion of energy. It employs fuzzy rule-bases, membership functions and parametric connectives in fuzzy logic to formalize subjective aspects of design, resulting in a two-phase simplification of the multi-objective constrained optimization of a design process. The methodology attempts to find a pareto-optimal solution for the design problem. In the primary phase of the methodology, a fuzzy-logic model is utilized to identify a region in the design space that contains the pareto-optimal design state, and a proper initial state is suggested for the optimization in the secondary phase, where the pareto-optimal solution is found. Finally, the impact of the designer's subjective attitude on the design is adjusted based on a system performance by utilizing an energy-based model of multidisciplinary systems. As an application, it is shown that the design of a five-degree-of-freedom industrial robot manipulator can be enhanced by using the methodology.
Suppliers significantly affect the effectiveness of sustainable supply chain management. Hence, it is extremely important to evaluate and select suppliers scientifically and objectively. Based on the theory of triple bottom line (economic, social, and environmental dimension) and a balanced scorecard, a measureable supplier evaluation framework in a sustainable supply chain is first formulated. Second, to reduce the defects of the single weight method, the subjective and objective weights of evaluation indicators are determined by combining the fuzzy best-worst method (BWM) and the entropy method, and then the combination weights are obtained through linear weighting. Third, the grey relational technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is further adopted to evaluate and rank the suppliers. Finally, a case study illustrates and demonstrates the availability of the proposed supplier evaluation index system and evaluation method. Subsequently, some suggestions are proposed according to the results.