Assessment of environmental and social sustainability performance of the freight transportation industry: An index-based approach

Abstract

The freight transportation activities having an impact on the freight logistics process. The environmental and social sustainability-related processes are poorly managed compared to the economic process. The quality of environmental and social sustainability (EnSoS) practices ought to be enhanced by measuring current sustainability practices, and at the same time, obstacles to sustainability have to be identified. Some of the previous work try to develop a sustainability framework, but less attention is paid to develop the EnSoS assessment framework for the freight transport industry. To bridge this research gap, this study develops an EnSoS framework based on an integrated multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method, i.e., fuzzy best-worst method (FBWM) and fuzzy logic approach. The proposed framework evaluates the current sustainability performance with an index and highlights the obstacles to the sustainable freight transportation system. The proposed framework presents two sustainability enablers, nine dimensions, and sixty-three sustainability attributes, including ten new attributes. The FBWM method is used to compute the fuzzy importance weight of attributes, whereas the fuzzy logic is used to assess the performance of each attribute. The proposed framework is validated with the case of the Indian freight industry. The fuzzy transportation EnSoS index (FTEnSoSI) is computed as (3.511, 6.366, 8.418), and close to ‘very environmental and social sustainable (VESS)’ label. The fuzzy performance importance index (FPII) is computed to assess the performance of each attribute. Based on FPII value, thirty attributes are identified as obstacles to transport sustainability. The result analysis presented proposed policy measures for improving EnSoS obstacles.