Dear Colleagues,

Developing sustainable supply chains represents one of today’s main global challenges. The increasing pressure on companies to meet environmental and social targets while ensuring the financial sustainability of the business represents a complex decision-making problem. Several environmental factors such as energy consumption, carbon footprints, emissions, waste of natural resources and water consumption have to be minimised while providing welfare for society.

Moreover, the recent shortage of items at retail stores or components in the automotive manufacturing sector during the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the fragility of supply chains and the need for re-thinking how products and services are provided to customers throughout their entire life cycle.

On the other hand, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, known as Industry 4.0, is pushing companies to digitalise their processes throughout the entire supply chain for improving data exchange, visibility of information, cyber security and overall performance. The development of technologies such as blockchains, cloud computing, virtual reality and advanced robotics is accelerating the transformation of the supply chain including sourcing, manufacturing and logistics operations. 

The aims of this Special Issue are to investigate what is the impact of digital technologies on sustainable production, how they are implemented for the various operations at the different stages in the supply chain and how they help companies in improving their economic, environmental and social performance.

We welcome articles using both qualitative and quantitative research methods, including, but not limited to, the following:

Multi-criteria decision-making analysis;

Multi-objective optimisation;

Machine learning techniques;

Simulation models;

Fuzzy logic;

Quantitative surveys;

Interviews;

Case studies.

• digital technologies
• Industry 4.0
• sustainability
• triple bottom line
• supply chain management