Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable supply chain (SC) management has attracted significant attention from researchers and practitioners in recent years across all three sustainability’s dimensions. SC networks are beginning to incorporate more environmentally and financially viable practices, particularly in light of climate change and the ever-growing concern of more efficient resource utilization. Labor rights, workforce health/safety, and product responsibility are just a few among various SC social sustainability prerequisites. Today’s SC networks, however, are increasingly complicated, highly disjointed and geographically dispersed, factors that significantly hinder the adoption of sustainability practices at every stage of the value chain, from raw materials acquisition to end products. SC traceability may be used to leverage SC networks’ sustainability claims (emissions reduction, product certification, consumer confidence, etc.) and to further increase SC transparency and visibility. In particular, SC traceability supported by disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT) could offer almost complete identification and recording of products and processes throughout complex SC networks.

Despite the significant leverage provided by the aforementioned technological advancements, SC traceability practices are still yet to be fully matured and efficiently integrated into current SC networks, particularly from a sustainability perspective. For example, several operational and managerial barriers, such as the lack of interoperability, privacy and ethical issues, opportunistic behavior, and cyberphysical threats, may hinder developing robust SC traceability mechanisms. Additionally, the scientific literature addressing the interconnection of SC traceability and sustainability is extremely limited so far. Therefore, there is a clear need to leverage sustainability and traceability-by-design mechanisms, especially in today’s complex and globalized SC networks.

In this Special Issue of Sustainability, we invite submissions focusing on SC traceability as a key enabler of SC sustainability. We welcome submissions that offer important conceptual and empirical insights into how traceability can be used to leverage the sustainability claims of SC networks, particularly based on disruptive technologies such as IoT, blockchain, AI, and collaborative platforms. Of particular interest are papers focusing on the intersection of sustainability and SC traceability in specific sectors such as food supply, electronics manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, textile, etc. 

Keywords

• Context-aware SC sustainability
• Economic, environmental, and social benefits of end-to-end SC traceability
• SC traceability and quality assurance
• Sustainability and SC transparency
• SC provenance and sustainability
• Industry 4.0 technologies, SC traceability and sustainability
• Sustainability and SC visibility
• Sector-specific SC traceability for improved sustainability
• Blockchain-based traceability for sustainable SC management
• Artificial Intelligence, process models, and optimization mechanisms to leverage sustainable SC and traceability mechanisms
• SC sustainability metrics, benchmarks and traceability
• Green computing applied to SC traceability processes
• Traceability and closed loop SC management
• Reverse logistics activities and traceability

Dr. Fran Casino
Dr. Thomas K. Dasaklis
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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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. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 1900 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.

• supply chain
• traceability
• sustainability
• reverse logistics
• optimization
• environmental impact
• artificial intelligence
• blockchain