Corporate sustainability assessment through fuzzy TOPSIS

The aim of this paper is to propose a decisionmaking methodology that enables the analysis and evaluation of sustainability at the corporate level. The proposed methodology grounds on two tools, namely the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) approach and fuzzy logic. The integration of these tools offers an effective way to deal with two typical issues of sustainability assessment, i.e.: 1) the fact that the company’s performance should be frequently evaluated against qualitative key performance indicators; and 2) the fact that to be meaningful, the company’s sustainability performance needs to be compared to a reference value, e.g. a threshold or benchmark, to evaluating how the company is distant from a target. The proposed approach has been applied to a real firm, operating in the food machinery industry, for testing purpose. The main pros and cons of the approach are described.