Sustainability Assessment: A Complex Many-Objective Multi-Agent Multidisciplinary Problem

With the implementation of sustainability laws by the European Union such as the European Sustainability Report Standards (ESRS), companies are forced to assess sustainability targets, impacts, and risks through sustainability reports. Identifying the current situation toward sustainability goals is one of the challenges that companies face. The ESRS standards coupled with the focus on addressing the three pillars of sustainability concurrently serve as compelling evidence that within the System of Systems (SoS) perspective, may be defined as a complex many-objective multi-agent multidisciplinary problem. Complexity arises from the interaction and dependency between different factors and disciplines not only in the higher level of the system design but also within solutions in the lower layers. Furthermore, multiple conflicting human-centric objectives make sustainability assessment a challenging SoS problem. This paper presents a pragmatic analysis of the current situation of organizations and future milestones in the journey to sustainability. The essential steps to achieve a targeted sustainability assessment are presented to address decision-making in the presence of conflicting objectives. A new formulation for sustainability assessment is proposed to have a more practical and feasible solution based on a company's sustainability readiness levels. This formulation shows that even for the same companies with the same functionality the appropriate scenario toward sustainability realization could be different according to their maturity relative to sustainability readiness levels.