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Food manufacturing is an important value-adding sector of both local economies and the global economy in terms of job creation, food security and participatory community development, among others. Along with highly relevant issues on energy consumption, unsustainable land-use patterns, waste generation associated with the industry, social issues in terms of health and safety of food products are part of the larger sustainability concerns. While maintaining economic stability at the firm level, there is a need to develop a sustainable manufacturing strategy that addresses competitiveness and sustainability. Emerging concerns for sustainable manufacturing are circulating, but focusing on a particular industry remains a gap. Thus, this paper attempts to formulate a sustainable manufacturing strategy and then to map this strategy to established best practices. The main departure of this work is: (1) identifying the content strategy of sustainable manufacturing strategy for food manufacturing firms, (2) determining the most relevant best practice that would largely address the content strategy and (3) providing guidelines for food manufacturing decision-makers and policy-makers in strategy formulation that aims to enhance the sustainability of their manufacturing firms. A fuzzy analytic hierarchy process–technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (AHP–TOPSIS) approach is used to formulate the strategy and then rank the best practices. A case study is carried out in the Philippines, and results show the content strategy and total quality management is the best practice that supports the sustainability of food manufacturing firms followed by resource and material efficiency approaches.

The constant growth of air travel in the Philippines has brought about significant consequences to air traffic congestion. Given limited resources, major airports seek to address this issue while considering various attributes generally affecting air transportation. This paper adopts fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory–analytic network process (DEMATEL–ANP) to identify the most critical attributes in the commercial aviation industry. A case study participated by key experts of Ninoy Aquino International Airport was conducted to illustrate the proposed approach. The fuzzy DEMATEL–ANP model performed satisfactorily as it was able to extract the global priority vectors of attributes under a fuzzy environment. The results showed that aviation safety is most prioritized, as can also be seen from the significant influence it brings on other attributes. Following next to safety in terms of priority are attributes that address the general air transportation system such as economic value, environmental value, social value, equitable treatment of competing airline, customer goodwill, and utilization of runway and terminal. Then, attributes relating to passenger cost, fuel cost, extra crew cost, landing/take-off fee, and cost of using flight routes are of last priority. Given the order of priorities and criticality of each attribute, short-term and long-term policies can be framed accordingly to propose air traffic flow management actions that can best address the issue on congestion.

Environmental regulations, the desire for market leadership and social stewardship along with pressing environmental crises have shifted manufacturing industries from focusing on traditional, purely profit-based strategies into pursuing the sustainability of manufactured products and manufacturing processes. However, assessing the sustainability levels of manufacturing industries poses a challenge due to the lack of holistic methods when in performing such assessments. In this area, current literature has embarked on computing an aggregate index for assessing sustainability performance. Nevertheless, approaches in computing sustainable manufacturing index are scarce in the literature. This paper presents a preliminary framework for computing a sustainable manufacturing index using the analytic hierarchy process. In this context, sustainability is interpreted from a triple-bottom line approach and the set of elements that comprise the index obtained from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology sustainable manufacturing repository. The use of this repository highlights a holistic approach in aggregate index computation as it offers a comprehensive list of elements of the triple-bottom line within the context of the manufacturing industry. Preliminary results have provided valuable insights into measuring sustainable manufacturing levels and could serve as a basic framework for index computation. The contribution of this work is on presenting a simple yet holistic approach towards computing a sustainable manufacturing index.

In the unit-load warehouse (UW) design, the aisle design problem dealing with storage space layout is the first among the three main problems. Several conventional and non-conventional designs have been proposed in the literature. In general, the assessment of UW designs is commonly carried out using analytical approaches. However, such an approach may be inadequate due to assumptions or approximations, making results unrealistic. Aiming to bridge this gap, this research develops an assessment framework that employs the FlexSim software for simulating the conventional, Flying-V and Fishbone designs based on a real case from a Philippine manufacturing company. Using a computer simulation, this research investigates factors not yet tractable with present analytical methods. The factors employed for the comparative assessment are “picking run-time”, “travel distance”, and “capacity”. The results suggest that the Fishbone design provides the most advantage compared to the Flying-V and other conventional designs. With the proposed Fishbone design, the company is expected to save, on average, 52.39% of picking run-time, 32.25% travel distance, and increase storage capacity by 7.5%. The research findings are compared to previous studies based on analytical approaches.

This article intends to integrate sustainability and the classical manufacturing strategy (MS) into a coherent hierarchical decision-making framework that identifies the content of a sustainable MS using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (fuzzy AHP). Instead of using the traditional fundamental scale of the AHP, linguistic variables with equivalent triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs) are used to elucidate judgement of elements in pairwise comparisons. AHP, as a widely adopted tool in multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problems, effectively handles the subjectivity and comprehensiveness of decision-making complexity that is structured hierarchically. Domain experts in MS and sustainability were asked to elicit judgement in AHP pairwise comparison approach. Results show the content strategy of the nine decision categories in manufacturing that addresses sustainability and competitiveness. A priority list of decisions is also presented which may guide decision-makers in resource allocation, medium- and long-range planning, and in formulating strategic initiatives. The main contribution of this article is the formulation of a sustainable MS from a hybrid approach that captures uncertainty and subjectivity in decision-making.

This paper adopts a modified approach of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure the academic efficiency of university departments. In real-world case studies, conventional DEA models often identify too many decision-making units (DMUs) as efficient. This occurs when the number of DMUs under evaluation is not large enough compared to the total number of decision variables. To overcome this limitation and reduce the number of decision variables, multi-objective data envelopment analysis (MODEA) approach previously presented in the literature is applied. The MODEA approach applies Shapley value as a cooperative game to determine the appropriate weights and efficiency score of each category of inputs. To illustrate the performance of the adopted approach, a case study is conducted in a university in the Philippines. The input variables are academic staff, non-academic staff, classrooms, laboratories, research grants, and department expenditures, while the output variables are the number of graduates and publications. The results of the case study revealed that all DMUs are inefficient. DMUs with efficiency scores close to the ideal efficiency score may be emulated by other DMUs with least efficiency scores.

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This paper applies the conventional DEA model and super-efficiency analysis in measuring the efficiency of an electricity distribution utility which involves 12 power lines as DMUs. The input indicators considered are purchased electricity supply and the total length of power lines, while electricity consumed, the number of consumers, and total power losses are the output indicators. The results revealed that 4 out of the 12 power lines are inefficient and thus need to be improved. The model provided a guideline how these inefficiencies may be addressed by means of benchmarking.

Due to its significant role in improving indoor air quality, displacement ventilation system is widely adopted in current literature. This paper proposes a displacement ventilation system for room conditions with ceilings that are relatively low, internal heat load could be high, walls could be sunlit, and occupants doing the low physical activity. These conditions are prevalent in the Philippines, being a tropical country. Input parameters to the design process such as heat load, the height of the ceiling, comfort, and indoor air quality requirements were generated, and the main output parameters are the stratification height and ventilation airflow rate. To demonstrate the proposed displacement ventilation system, four cases were generated. Results show that the ventilation airflow rates obtained from the four cases were greater than the minimum outdoor air requirements for health in conference rooms and large assembly areas which are 17.5 and 3.5 liters/sec*person respectively, for smoking and no smoking rooms.

To illustrate the influence of bonding social capital in the development initiatives of local communities and to contribute to the on-going theoretical debate on the effects of bonding social capital to communities, the cultural variable was used in the analysis using post-disaster recovery experience of a community. By using interview transcripts and conversation notes for this work, people's cultural and circumstances determined the social formation processes as responses to their circumstantial needs. The ethno-political organization (purok), the cooperative work (pintakasi) and the smooth interpersonal relationship (hugoy-hugoy) were cultural factors that explicate the strength of the bonding social capital. This article concluded that the inclusion of a cultural variable in the bonding social capital discussion is relevant and found that a flood-prone community, and those communities which are susceptible to natural hazards, relied on their social capital with greater expectations from the bonding social capital.