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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Transportation".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 14295

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Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Tijun Fan

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Guest Editor

School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China
Interests: operations management; supply chain coordination; logistics

Prof. Dr. Haijun Wang

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Guest Editor

School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
Interests: supply chain uncertainty; supply chain coordination; big data supply chain analysis

Dr. Bin Shen

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Guest Editor

Glorious Sun School of Business and Management, Donghua University, Shanghai, China
Interests: supply chain management; operations management; new technology and innovation
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The outbreak of COVID-19 has disrupted supply chain activities across the world. Supply chains are vulnerable today and increasingly rely on technologies. The examples include the recent shortage of semiconductors, lumber, and steel. Sustainability topics, including climate change, the circular economy, carbon neutrality, and energy consumption, have been the top agenda in shareholder meetings as well as important topics for scholars. Digitalization is often targeted at efficiency improvements. Digital technologies have been helping with sustainability goals and with improving supply chain resilience. Adopting digitalization technology results in tangible and intangible benefits across supply chains.

In this Special Issue, we aim to publish state-of-the-art research concerning digital technologies for supply chain resilience and sustainability. The research methodology can be qualitative or quantitative. Thus, research methodologies such as analytical modeling, statistical-based empirical analysis, and case studies are welcomed. We also invite interested authors to contribute technical research and comprehensive review articles to this Special Issue.

Key Words:

Value of augmented reality on resilient and sustainable operations and supply chains
Cyberphysical systems with automatic manufacturing in resilient and sustainable operations and supply chains
Blockchain-enabled operations and supply chain management for resilience and sustainability
Using information technology and data analytics for managing resilient and sustainable operations and supply chains
Drone technologies in resilient and sustainable operations and supply chain management
AI/Machine learning and IoTs for improving resilient and sustainable operations and supply chain efficiency
Managing resilient and sustainable operations and supply chain with the application of additive manufacturing
Using advanced technologies to improve social and environmental impacts in sustainable resilient and operations and supply chain management
Using emerging technologies to manage resilient and sustainable operations and supply chain during the outbreak of COVID-19

Prof. Dr. Tijun Fan
Prof. Dr. Haijun Wang
Dr. Bin Shen
Guest Editors

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Keywords

digital technologies
supply chain
resilience
sustainability
augmented reality
cyber-physical systems
blockchain-enabled
information technology
AI/machine learning
additive manufacturing

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 2072 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Agency, Reselling, or Hybrid: Strategic Channel Selection in a Green Supply Chain

by Yumin Fu, Jianyun Wu, Cheng Ma and Xiaoyu Fu

Sustainability 2023, 15(3), 2016; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15032016 - 20 Jan 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1474

Abstract

This study explores the channel preference of a platform and a green manufacturer in an online market. The platform offers both the agency channel and the reselling channel, while the manufacturer designs a green product to improve the green effort and sells it through the platform. We find that the manufacturer’s channel preference is determined by the interaction of the green investment, the commission rate, and the competition intensity. In contrast, the online platform prefers the hybrid channel when both the commission rate and green investment inefficiency are moderate but prefers the agency channel otherwise. Interestingly, the manufacturer can change its sales center between the reselling channel and the agency channel, thus resulting in a win–win outcome for the manufacturer and the platform by selecting the hybrid channel. This study reveals the benefits of green product selling in an online market and provides useful guidelines for green product manufacturers and platform managers in improving their strategic selling channel. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Technologies for Supply Chain Resilience and Sustainability)

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19 pages, 1220 KiB

Open AccessArticle

S&T Innovation Platform Sharing Service Contract Mechanism to Achieve Supply Chain Resilience

by Ling Liang, Zishu Han, Jiaping Xie, Jialiang Wang, Nan Shi and Weijun Zhu

Sustainability 2022, 14(21), 14124; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142114124 - 29 Oct 2022

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1725

Abstract

While achieving fruitful patents in innovation, enterprises can face bottlenecks in industrial transformation. The fundamental cause of such difficulties is the lack of pilot equipment. To this end, the science and technology (S&T) innovation platform introduces equipment sharing to solve the problems in transforming enterprise patents. Based on the premise that service demand is endogenous to platform service effort and user relationship resilience, this paper introduces revenue-sharing and cost-sharing contract mechanisms. It constructs a Stackelberg game model between S&T innovation platforms and enterprise users. Further, we explore the decision-making optimization involving platform service pricing, service effort, and a user’s relationship resilience. Our main findings are: (1) service pricing and relationship resilience show supermodularity to the platform revenue while showing submodularity to the user revenue. (2) The optimal user relationship resilience always indicates a decreasing trend in the pricing of platform services. (3) The platform and users have their preferences for contract types. When the platform dominates the game, they tend to adopt a revenue-sharing contract. When the users dominate, they are more willing to implement a cost-sharing contract. (4) As the S&T innovation platform strengthens the connection between the platform and users through the revenue- and cost-sharing contracts, it further enhances the supply chain collaboration among equipment suppliers, technology innovation platforms, and users, thereby achieving the purpose of improving supply chain sustainability and resilience. Technological innovation is an essential means to improve supply chain sustainability and resilience. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Technologies for Supply Chain Resilience and Sustainability)

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27 pages, 2587 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Monopolistic vs. Competitive Supply Chain Concerning Selection of the Platform Selling Mode in Three Power Structures

by Lixi Zhou, Tijun Fan, Jie Yang and Lihao Zhang

Sustainability 2022, 14(17), 11016; https://doi.org/10.3390/su141711016 - 4 Sep 2022

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1990

Abstract

This paper studies the selection of selling modes in a monopolistic and a competitive supply chain circumstance, where each supply chain comprises a supplier and an e-platform. The e-platform usually acts as a product reseller or serves as an online marketplace. The former is referred to as a reselling mode where the order fulfillment cost is paid by the supplier, and the latter is named as an agency selling mode where the platform pays for the order fulfillment cost. Motivated by the industrial cases, three power structures are utilized to capture the veridical market pricing. We find that the platform and the supplier’s selling mode strategies conflict in a great majority of cases, except for the region in which both the platform agency fee and the order fulfillment cost are moderate. The players can coordinate by Pareto improvement, and the improved result shows that the optimal selling modes are a reselling mode in the fierce competitive supply chain circumstance and agency selling mode in the monopolistic circumstance or the mild competitive circumstance. Surprisingly, adopting a reselling mode is not only a better choice than adopting an agency selling mode in the fierce competitive supply chain circumstance, but this makes the supply chain obtain more of a payoff than in the monopolistic circumstance. Furthermore, it is worth noting that each player choosing an agency selling mode will result in a “prisoner’s dilemma” in the competitive supply chain circumstance, where both players can obtain more payoffs with a reselling mode. In addition, the willingness of platforms and suppliers to play the role of “reseller” is the strongest under the ps structure and the weakest in the ss structure. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Technologies for Supply Chain Resilience and Sustainability)

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17 pages, 2235 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Optimal Model and Algorithm of Medical Materials Delivery Drone Routing Problem under Major Public Health Emergencies

by Lijing Du, Xiaohuan Li, Yuan Gan and Kaijun Leng

Sustainability 2022, 14(8), 4651; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14084651 - 13 Apr 2022

Cited by 16 | Viewed by 3078

Abstract

To reduce distribution risk and improve the efficiency of medical materials delivery under major public health emergencies, this paper introduces a drone routing problem with time windows. A mixed-integer programming model is formulated considering contactless delivery, total travel time, and customer service time windows. Utilizing Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition, the proposed optimization model is converted into a path-based master problem and a pricing subproblem based on an elementary shortest path problem with resource constraints. We embed the pulse algorithm into a column generation framework to solve the proposed model. The effectiveness of the model and algorithm is verified by addressing different scales of Solomon datasets. A case study on COVID-19 illustrates the application of the proposed model and algorithm in practice. We also perform a sensitivity analysis on the drone capacity that may affect the total distribution time. The experimental results enrich the research related to vehicle routing problem models and algorithms under major public health emergencies and provide optimized relief distribution solutions for decision-makers of emergency logistics. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Technologies for Supply Chain Resilience and Sustainability)

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21 pages, 1518 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Implementation of a Smart Contract on a Consortium Blockchain for IoT Applications

by Ting Lin, Ziyi Huan, Yongcan Shi and Xu Yang

Sustainability 2022, 14(7), 3921; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14073921 - 26 Mar 2022

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2972

Abstract

Advancements in cryptography and computer science have given birth to blockchain technology. One of the most exciting evolutions of blockchain is the advancements in smart contract technology. Smart contracts can be used for a broad range of use cases, not just financial transactions. Smart contract technology on the public blockchain, represented by Ethereum, due to its public and opaque nature, is not a good choice for many scenarios that do not require full disclosure, such as many IoT applications. On the other hand, the existing blockchain smart contract system still has a strong connection with virtual currency, which also limits its application in non-financial scenarios. In order to solve the above problems and explore more of the potential of smart contracts for the IoT application domain, this paper mainly explores the construction of a smart contract system based on consortium blockchains associated with no virtual currency. Based on the smart contract system designed in this project, blockchain can be more easily applied in payment, product traceability, authority authentication, and other fields. Through a certain centralized way, the system is easier to manage, can reduce the management expenditure, and the power and other resource consumption is less, which is conducive to environmental protection. Results show that our smart contract system has the potential for IoT usage in the future. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Technologies for Supply Chain Resilience and Sustainability)

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13 pages, 2308 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Multi-Stove Scheduling for Sustainable On-Demand Food Delivery

by Tao Dai and Xiangqi Fan

Sustainability 2021, 13(23), 13133; https://doi.org/10.3390/su132313133 - 26 Nov 2021

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1839

Abstract

Ordering food through mobile apps and crowdsourcing resources has become increasingly popular in the digital age. Restaurants can improve customer satisfaction to satisfy on-demand food orders by shortening waiting time and achieving sustainability through fuel reduction. In the present study, we construct a double-layer scheduling model, which is developed using the characteristics of on-demand food preparation, including the use of multiple stoves, a variety of dishes in one order, and the integration of the same dishes from different customers. The bottom layer is a multi-stove dish package scheduling model based on parallel machine scheduling. The upper layer is an order selection model based on the knapsack problem. To identify the optimal solution, four strategies for calculating the weight coefficient of the dish package are proposed to shorten the waiting time and realize sustainability. Numerical experiments are designed to analyze the differences of the final scheduling results under the four strategies. The bottom layer is extended to another model based on the vehicle routing optimization model, given the switch time between different dishes. The extension of the model is also compared in the numerical experiments. Our paper confirms the necessity of using a double-layer model for multi-strategy comparison in order to achieve sustainable on-demand scheduling. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Technologies for Supply Chain Resilience and Sustainability)

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