Modeling and Managing Complex Supply Chain Systems: Resilience, Sustainability, and Innovation in Operations

Dear Colleagues,

Contemporary supply chains operate as complex, adaptive socio-technical systems shaped by uncertainty, interdependence, and rapid transformation across organizational, technological, and societal domains. Organizing the future of such systems requires explicitly systems-oriented approaches that integrate people, artificial intelligence, ethical considerations, and sustainable industrial engineering into operational decision-making across multiple system levels. Recent global disruptions and environmental challenges have highlighted the need for resilient and responsible supply chain systems capable of adapting to dynamic conditions through coordinated, system-wide responses. Sustainability has become a fundamental requirement, encompassing environmental performance, social responsibility, ethical governance, and long-term system viability. Modeling and managing these dimensions jointly demand holistic and systems-oriented frameworks able to capture complexity, trade-offs, and system-wide impacts. Moreover, innovation in operations, particularly eco-innovation, plays a central role in enabling resilient and sustainable supply chains. Advances in digitalization, artificial intelligence, simulation, and digital twins enhance system-level visibility, flexibility, and coordination while reducing environmental and social impacts.

Modern supply chain management increasingly relies on the interaction between human expertise and advanced analytical, data-driven, and AI-based methods to support planning, coordination, and control across strategic, tactical, and operational decision-making levels.

This Special Issue focuses on the modeling and management of complex supply chain systems with particular emphasis on resilience, sustainability, and innovation in operations. Topics of interest include supply chain resilience and disruption management; sustainable and circular supply chain design; ethical and human-centered operations; multi-objective, stochastic, and robust optimization; simulation, system dynamics, and digital twins; artificial intelligence and data-driven decision support; and system-level performance assessment.

This Special Issue invites researchers to submit original, high-quality contributions that advance systems-based theories, methods, and applications, supporting the organization of future supply chains that are efficient, resilient, ethical, and sustainable.

Dr. Eugenia Babiloni
Dr. Beatriz Andres
Guest Editors

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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Systems 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 2400 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.