This paper aims to study the progress of research on Sustainable Tourism and to outline and identify the key disciplines, journals, articles and authors. This is carried out through a wide, in-depth, and structured examination of published scholarly papers. In recent decades, sustainable tourism has been one of the most significant subjects among academics and practitioners. In this paper, a classification scheme and a comprehensive literature review are presented in order to clarify, categorise, and interpret the current research on sustainable tourism definitions and applications. The classification scheme for this review contains 132 scholarly papers from 47 journals since the year 1993 up to 2013 categorised into 14 application areas. The five major topics are Paradigm, Sustainable Tourism Development, Market research and Economic, Policy-making, and Infrastructure. The scholarly papers are also sorted by (we suggest using the exact order used later in the paper) (1) year of publication; (2) publication journal; (3) subject area citations. It is hoped that this paper provides the needs of researchers and practitioners with easy references for sustainable tourism and its definitions and applications, and also presents future research opportunities.

For a few years, there has been an increasing consciousness to design structures that are concurrently economic and environmentally responsive. Eco-friendly inferences of building designs include lower energy consumption, reduction in CO₂ emissions, assimilated energy in buildings and enhancement of indoor air quality. With the aim of fulfilling design objectives, designers normally encounter a situation in which the selection of the most appropriate material from a set of various material alternatives is essential. Sustainability has been developing as a new concept in all human activities to create a better balance between social, environmental and economic issues. Designing materials based on the sustainability concept is a key step to enable a better balance because there is no need to re-structure phases and procedures to make the system more efficient in comparison to previous models. Some of the most commonly used materials are household furnishing materials, which can be electrical devices, kitchen gears or general furnishing materials. The volume of production and consumption of these materials is considerable, therefore a newer sustainable plan for a better designed system is justifiable. In the literature, the application of multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) methods has been found to be very suitable for evaluating materials and developing general plans for them. This study contributes by applying two approaches based on MADM methods for weighting the criteria related to the sustainable design of household furnishing materials. Step-Wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) and Best Worst Method (BWM) are two specialized and new methods for weighting criteria with different approaches. This paper has not only investigated the weighting of important and related criteria for sustainable design but has also evaluated the similarities and differences between the considered weighting methods. A comparative study of SWARA and BWM methods has never been conducted to date. The results show that, except pairwise comparisons, SWARA and BWM are certainly similar and in some cases SWARA can be more accurate and effective.

To stay competitive in a business environment, continuous performance evaluation based on the triple bottom line standard of sustainability is necessary. There is a gap in addressing the computational expense caused by increased decision units due to increasing the performance evaluation indices to more accuracy in the evaluation. We successfully addressed these two gaps through (1) using principal component analysis (PCA) to cut the number of evaluation indices, and (2) since PCA itself has the problem of merely using the data distribution without considering the domain-related knowledge, we utilized Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to rank the indices through the expert’s domain-related knowledge. We propose an integrated approach for sustainability performance assessment in qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Fourteen insurance companies were evaluated using eight economic, three environmental, and four social indices. The indices were ranked by expert judgment though an analytical hierarchy process as subjective weighting, and then principal component analysis as objective weighting was used to reduce the number of indices. The obtained principal components were then used as variables in the data envelopment analysis model. So, subjective and objective evaluations were integrated. Finally, for validating the results, Spearman and Kendall’s Tau correlation tests were used. The results show that Dana, Razi, and Dey had the best sustainability performance.

Producing and designing products are keys of success and have a critical role in industries. This research presents a new framework for special situations using Yin-Yang balance (YYB) theory in producing and designing products with new perspectives. This paper considers general situations in producing products for international producers and industries. SWARA method is applied for prioritizing important criteria of this issue. Six criteria of this research based on their priority were considered as important: general features of each product and applications, cost control and final pricing policies, appearance with moderate perspective, marketing researches in details, identifying target markets in details and special attention to production capabilities. This framework can be modified regarding the needs.

The hospital location selection problem is one of the most important decisions in the healthcare sector in big cities due to population growth and the possibility of a high number of daily referred patients. A poor location selection process can lead to many issues for the health workforce and patients, and it can result in many unnecessary costs for the healthcare systems. The COVID-19 outbreak had a noticeable effect on people’s lives and the service quality of hospitals during recent months. The hospital location selection problem for infected patients with COVID-19 turned out to be one of the most significant and complicated decisions with many uncertain involved parameters for healthcare sectors in countries with high cases. In this study, a gray-based decision support framework using criteria importance through inter-criteria correlation (CRITIC) and combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) methods is proposed for location selection of a temporary hospital for COVID-19 patients. A case study is performed for Istanbul using the proposed decision-making framework.