Special Issue "Industry 4.0 and Sustainable Supply Chain Management"
A special issue of Processes (ISSN 2227-9717). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Processes".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2019) | Viewed by 9769
Special Issue Editors

Interests: industrial logistics; supply chain management; industrial plants
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Interests: innovation; open innovation; business model innovation; sustainability; circular economy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Interests: logistic and supply chain management; sustainable innovations for supply chain; sustainable supply chain; analysis and optimization of supply chains; supply chain performances

Interests: Industry 4.0 for worker safety; security of industrial plants; augmented reality solutions for safety; supply chain management; sustainable supply chain; sustainable innovations for supply chain; supply chain performances; analysis and optimization of supply chains.
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The introduction of Industry 4.0 has proven to be successful in providing various business benefits, including operational optimization and value chain optimization. The term Industry 4.0 was coined to mark the fourth industrial revolution, a new paradigm enabled by the introduction of the Internet of things (IoT). Industry 4.0’s vision consists in networks of machines collaborating in a smart factory setting, able of autonomously exchanging information while controlling each other (Tjahjono et al., 2017).
The link between the concepts of Industry 4.0 and sustainable supply chain management is the focus of this Special Issue. Total system integration and automation are key developments in Industry 4.0 (Kagermann, 2015; Zhou et al., 2015). Sustainability, on the other hand, is grounded on the well-known triple bottom line approach, which aims at enhancing the economic, environmental, and social performance of a supply chain, and is increasingly gaining importance among companies. At the same time, however, digitalization of business is no more a choice in today’s dynamic business environment. From these considerations, some questions arise and need to be answered. What is the relationship between Industry 4.0 solutions and supply chain sustainability? Can Industry 4.0 technologies impact on the sustainability of a supply chain? Can Industry 4.0 technologies be leveraged to enhance the sustainability of a supply chain? What is the (positive or negative) impact of implementing Industry 4.0 technologies on the economic, environmental, and social performance of a supply chain? Which technologies can have a (positive or negative) impact on the sustainability of a supply chain?
Our aim with this Special Issue is to encourage research that helps answer some of these questions by means of review studies or research papers providing evidence of the relationship between Industry 4.0 technologies and supply chain sustainability.
Prof. Dr. Eleonora Bottani
Prof. Dr. Barbara Bigliardi
Dr. Giorgia Casella
Dr. Letizia Tebaldi
Guest Editors
References:
Tjahjono, B., Esplugues, C., Enrique, A., Peláez, G.C. (2017). What does Industry 4.0 mean to Supply Chain? Procedia Manufacturing, 13, 1175-1182
Kagermann, H. (2015). Change through digitization: value creation in the age of Industry 4.0. In: Albach, H., Meffert, H., Pinkwart, A. and Reichwald, R. (Eds), Management of Permanent Change, Springer Gabler, Wiesbaden, pp. 23-45, doi: 10.1007/978-3-658-05014-6_2.
Zhou, K., Liu, T., Zhou, L. (2015). Industry 4.0: towards future industrial opportunities and challenges. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery, IEEE, Zhangjiajie, pp. 2147-2152, doi: 10.1109/FSKD.2015.7382284
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Processes is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- sustainable supply chain
- Industry 4.0
- internet of things
- big data
- simulation
- cyber-physical systems
- additive manufacturing
- augmented reality