Evaluation of sustainability performance of the rail freight transportation: An index-based analysis

Abstract

The freight transportation industry must adopt sustainable practices to tackle environmental and social challenges. The existing literature considers sustainable performance measurement of the overall freight transportation industry, which left a research gap in developing a sustainable performance assessment framework comprising sustainability indicators precisely modelled for rail freight transportation. This sets a motivation for the existing research to measure the triple bottom line performance of rail freight business. This study proposes an index-based sustainable performance assessment framework using the spherical fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (SF-AHP) and fuzzy logic-based approach. Thirty-six sustainability indicators are identified using literature analysis and experts’ opinions. These indicators are divided into six sustainability measures and three triple bottom line dimensions. The SF-AHP method is used to evaluate the relative importance of these sustainability indicators, and the fuzzy logic is used to compute the performance of each indicator based on inputs collected from experts in linguistic terms. The proposed research framework is applied to the Indian Railways (IR) for validation. The result of this study indicates a sustainability index of 16.1141 for IR, which is close to “fairly high sustainable” performance. Further, the indicators that hinder sustainable performance are identified by evaluating the fuzzy performance importance index. Government policymakers and IR officials can focus more on these highlighted indicators to further enhance IR’s sustainable rail freight transportation.