Environmental decision making: combining engineering and business aspects

Abstract

This dissertation provides a new method of making environmental decisions by combining engineering and business aspects. Companies in the future will be looking for methods that provide for sustainable development. This dissertation provides decision makers within companies the ability to utilize the Stewart Environmental Management (SEM) decision support system. The original data from this dissertation was developed through a Mini-Delphi survey of 11 experts. The Mini-Delphi provided current and future thoughts of these experts regarding environmental management systems and how decisions concerning the environment are made in companies. From the Mini-Delphi data, a decision support system was developed. The first aspect of the SEM decision support system is the utilization of the environmental management matrix. This matrix requires that a company consider its relative position between the perceived position of compliance, ranging from non-compliance to industry leader, with several aspects such as environmental posture, regulatory attitude and others. Once the company decides its relative position, then the collective knowledge base will determine how to interact with the perceived environmental problems. The decision support system combines the engineering, financial and marketing aspects of the company into one collective knowledge base. This collective knowledge base interprets the environmental problem and then utilizes an expert naturalistic decision making system to provide for an alternative. The alternative is implemented and a feedback loop is provided to constantly improve on the selected alternative. The SEM is an improvement over traditional decision support systems because it is a system that identifies and provides a dynamic method of environmental decisions by combining the engineering and business aspects within a company. Future research of this topic will include further studies on the effectiveness of the SEM decision support system.