Chapter 13 Multi-Criteria Decision Making After Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Under Hybrid Information

Life cycle assessment (LCA), also called “environmental life cycle assessment” regulated by ISO 14040 standard has been recognized as one of the most powerful tools for assessing the environmental performance of a product or process in life cycle perspective from the extraction of raw materials to the end of the product (Saad et al., 2011). However, as a tool, LCA which is environmental-centric cannot incorporate the economic and social performances. Life cycle costing (LCC), which refers to an economic performance technique, can encompass all associated costs of a product in its whole life cycle (Sherif and Kolarik, 1981). Social life cycle assessment (SLCA), is a social assessment technique to assess the social performance of products and the potential impacts, including both positive and negative, in their life cycle (UNEP, 2009). Similarly, life cycle costing (LCC) and social life cycle assessment (SLCA) can only investigate the economic and the social pillar of sustainability, respectively. Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA), which combines LCA, LCC, and SCLA, can assess the economic, environmental, and social aspects of products or processes (Guin ee, 2016). Therefore, life cycle sustainability assessment has been widely used for sustainability assessment of energy and industrial systems recently for its advantage of incorporating economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability simultaneously.