Sustainable High-Tech Brick Production with Energy-Oriented Consumption: An Integrated Possibilistic Approach Based on Criteria Interdependencies

Ehsan Solgi, Hossein Gitinavard and Reza Tavakkoli-Moghaddam
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Ehsan Solgi: Department of Industrial Engineering & Management Systems, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran 1591634311, Iran
Hossein Gitinavard: Department of Industrial Engineering & Management Systems, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran 1591634311, Iran
Reza Tavakkoli-Moghaddam: School of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran 1439957131, Iran

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-22

Abstract: Brick making contributes significantly to the of supply materials for the building industry. The majority of brick production sectors, especially in developing countries, employ polluting and energy-inefficient technologies. Due to the increasing pressures on manufacturing firms to improve economic performance and growing environmental protection issues, sustainable and clean production is the main concern for brick makers. This paper considers the technological, economic, environmental, social, and energy-oriented criteria to select the optimal brick production technologies. Therefore, technology selection is viewed as a multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) problem. This research proposes a novel hybrid fuzzy MCGDM (HFMCGDM) model to tackle the problem. In this respect, first of all, the modified triangular fuzzy pair-wise comparison (MTFPC) method is proposed to compute the local weights of criteria and sub-criteria. Then, a fuzzy DEMATEL (FDEMATEL) method is presented to calculate the interdependencies between and within the criteria. Moreover, the integration of MTFPC and FDEMATEL methods is applied to calculate the global criteria weights. Afterward, a novel method is proposed to determine the experts’ weight. Considering the last aggregation approach to diminish data loss, a new version of a fuzzy TOPSIS method is proposed to find the local and global priorities of the candidates. Then, a case study is given to demonstrate the applicability and superiority of the proposed methodology. To get a deeper view about considering kilns, energy and environmental performance of which has been investigated. Moreover, a comparative analysis is presented to illuminate the merits of the proposed methodology. Eventually, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to peruse the influence of criteria weights on ranking order.

Keywords: energy consumption; group decision-making; sustainable production; fuzzy environment; brick industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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