Multi-Period Sustainability Performance in the Presence of Discrete and Bounded Measures

Sustainability performance assessment is a significant aspect of making sustainable decisions for organizations. Measuring sustainability performance of firms in a time span, covered in several periods, leads to more rational decision-making and planning by managers. Furthermore, in many application fields, there are discrete and bounded measures. However, there has been no systematic effort to analyze sustainability performance of Decision-Making Units (DMUs) in multiple periods of time when discrete and bounded factors are presented. Therefore, approaches based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) are proposed in this paper to tackle this problem. To illustrate this issue in more detail, the performance of systems is measured for all dimensions, including economic, social, and environmental ones and for each period. Moreover, the overall multi-period sustainability performance and sustainability performance of each period are estimated using the suggested one-stage methods. Then, the sustainability performance is investigated for conditions in which internal relationships among economic, social, and environmental indicators are presented. Moreover, sustainability performance changes and performance changes of dimensions are addressed. An example and a case study are provided to explain our proposed approach. Results show that the introduced ideas are practical and effective.