A sustainable development benchmarking framework for energy companies based on topic mining and knowledge graph: The case of oil and gas industry

Benchmarking is one of the key management approaches to support companies to continuously improve and gain competitive advantage. However, previous benchmarking management suffered from subjectivity and one-sidedness, and the benchmarking evaluation was only to identify the benchmark and its own deficiencies, with a high degree of independence between the sub-processes. The framework is the first to jointly apply topic mining and relation extraction techniques to establish an objective index system and mine the mechanistic relations among the indexes, and finally provides a concise and interactive display of the results based on knowledge graph visualization. In this study, 50 oil and gas companies are taken as examples to carry out the case study of sustainable development benchmarking management, and a sustainable development program with strong logic and systematicity is proposed at both macro and micro levels. This study results verify that the framework can effectively improve the scientific, comprehensive and systematic nature of sustainable development benchmarking management. At the same time, the framework extends the role of the index system so that it can provide the necessary mechanistic guidance for subsequent sustainable development programmatic to achieve programmatic with a high degree of synergy. In addition, the framework has a high degree of coherence with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the proposals put forward can not only be used to improve the sustainable development capability of companies themselves, but also contribute to the realization of the SDGs.