Exploring the relationships between formalisation and validation tools in sustainability assessment models: Insights from formal concept analysis

• Explores how sustainability assessment formalisation & validation tools are linked. • Association rules reveal key formalisation-validation tool pairings. • Proposes Formal Concept Analysis based Decision Support System. • Decision Support System aids tool selection using ranked recommendations. Sustainability has emerged as a critical concern for manufacturing organisations due to increasing resource scarcity, alongside many other environmental and social concerns. Sustainability assessment models (SAM) play a vital role in evaluating and improving the environmental, economic, and social impacts of manufacturing organisations. To develop a robust sustainability assessment model, it is important to understand how these models are formalised and validated. Consequently, discovering the relationships, whether implicit or explicit, among the formalisation and validation tools can be of value. To this end, the present work uses Formal Concept Analysis, as a clustering tool, to uncover the hidden relationships among several SAM formalisation and validation tools. The findings, in terms of association rules, reveal common pairings of formalisation and validation tools. In addition, a Decision Support System (DSS) has been developed to further assist the researchers in the sustainability assessment field to identify complementary formalisation and validation tools. The DSS takes a formalisation tool as input and, leveraging the derived association rules, provides ranked recommendations for additional complementary formalisation and validation tools. This research contributes to the existing literature by bridging the gap in understanding the interactions among SAM formalisation and validation tools, ultimately leading to more reliable and effective sustainability assessments in manufacturing.