A systems thinking-based grey model for sustainability evaluation of urban tourism

Purpose – This research aims to establish an index system and a grey comprehensive evaluation model for analyzing the sustainability of urban tourism. Design/methodology/approach – The sustainability evaluation of urban tourism is regarded as a multi-level and multi-index evaluation problem in this study. The evaluation index system of urban tourism sustainable development is constructed based on the ideas of holism and systems thinking. Then based on grey system correlation analysis theory, a new evaluation model is proposed to effectively solve the complex and uncertain problems in the sustainability evaluation system of urban tourism. An actual example of the five cities (Nanjing, Zhenjiang, Changzhou, Wuxi and Suzhou) in Southern Jiangsu Province of China is adopted to demonstrate the feasibility and practicability of the proposed model. Findings – The grey comprehensive evaluation model can effectively convert the complex indices into comprehensive optimal membership degrees which are easy to be unde...