Development of Sustainable Manufacturing Performance Evaluation Expert System for Small and Medium Enterprises

This study proposes a fuzzy rule based expert system for sustainable manufacturing performance assessment in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The initial set of measures and metrics have been identified from the literature based on the characteristics of SMEs. Sixteen metrics were identified and categorized under four economic, five environmental and three social measures. Considering the involvement of human reasoning in the decision making process of manufacturing SMEs, it is proposed to gather the inputs in terms of linguistic variables. The fuzzy rule-based expert system is proposed to elicit the performances of all the aspects and overall sustainability of the organization based on triple bottom-line framework.