SSbD-related work at the Leiden University Decision Engineering for SustaInability and REsilience (DESIRE) Laboratory

Marco will present their recently developed Composite Indicator (CI) for Safety, Sustainability and Circularity assessment, the CI-SSbDC. 

This CI allows, at the same time, to (i) apply the SSbD framework with only one alternative, as well as with more than one, (ii) test the effect of different compensation levels on the final decision recommendation, and (iii) include circularity indicators too. A key novelty of this work in this area consists in the use of a MCDA method that allows to harmonize all the impact and benefit values on a common scale. In addition, it accommodates decision-makers with different preference structures, from weak to strong concepts of sustainability.

Marco will show the stepwise procedure proposed to apply our index. This includes (i) safety, life cycle sustainability and circularity assessment using five dimensions, namely “hazard dimension”, “health dimension”, “environmental dimension”, “circular dimension”, and “economic dimension”, and (ii) aggregation of the information to provide a score between 0.01 and 1 that characterises the overall performance of the alternatives. The test of the CI-SSbDC in three case studies, using bio-based waste streams to produce nisin will conclude the talk. 

Speaker: Marco Cinelli (Leiden University)

Marco Cinelli is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University College (LUC) in the Netherlands, where he leads the interdisciplinary laboratory Decision Engineering for SustaInability and REsilience (DESIRE). He is also a guest researcher at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) of Leiden University.

His research is focused on the development of Decision Support Systems (DSSs) with Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). The main frameworks he uses include sustainability, resilience and risk assessment, while the main application areas are energy systems and technologies assessment, materials and processes development, and chemical safety.

Before joining LUC, between September 2018 and September 2021, Marco was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at (i) the Laboratory for Energy Systems Analysis, Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen PSI, Switzerland, (ii) the Center for Environmental Solutions and Emergency Response (CESER) (formerly National Risk Management Research Laboratory (NRMRL)) of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Cincinnati, USA and (iii) the Institute of Computing Science at Poznan University of Technology, Poland. Marco received his Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Warwick (UK) in 2016.