A fuzzy approach to rebust Social Sustainability Assessment(ISSA)

Abstract

Social sustainability has been increasingly recognized as a fundamental component of sustainable development in recent years. It is still challenging to measure social sustainability in comparison to other dimensions of sustainability (environmental and economic). The current study enhances the authors' proposed approach to assessing and quantifying social sustainability; Integrated Social Sustainabilit Assessment (ISSA). Fuzzy set theory was incorporated into the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) level in order to model the uncertainties associated with expert responses. To define uncertainty and construct fuzzy sets based on expert opinion, a novel approach has been developed. The same data from the available case study was used to evaluate the enhanced framework. The results show considerable change in the weight of some indicators and consequently in the social sustainability index. According to the results, the weight of some indicators and the social sustainability index have changed significantly. Fuzzy social assessment frameworks have been shown to be robust to responses from experts with acceptable levels of accuracy.