Integrated Data Envelopment Analysis, Weighting Method and Life Cycle Thinking: A Quantitative Framework for Life Cycle Sustainability Improvement.

Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA), which combines life cycle assessment, life cycle costing, and social life cycle assessment, can investigate the environmental impacts, economic performance, and social aspects of different processes or products. However, it is still difficult for the users of LCSA to know the methods for improving the sustainability of the processes or products with weak sustainability performances. This study aims to develop a methodological framework by combining data envelopment, weighting method, and life cycle sustainability assessment method to achieve sustainability improvement of processes or products in a quantitative way. The intuitionistic fuzzy AHP method is employed to determine the data of different processes or products with respect to the soft criteria (especially criteria in social aspect), and LCSA is employed to collect the data with respect to the hard criteria. After determining the data of all the alternative processes or products, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is employed to identify the DEA-efficient and non-DEA efficient scenarios and propose the methods for improving the sustainability of the non-DEA-efficient scenarios.