Logistics and Sustainable Supply Chain Management (Series) II

Dear Colleagues,

In the post-pandemic era, there is growing attention regarding what lessons academia and industrial practitioners have learned and how the community, society, and the nation can revitalize the logistics and supply chain management fields. Business participants and supply chain researchers are both increasingly aware of the significance of incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into their daily business activities and in proposed studies, due to a flurry of COVID‑induced supply chain disruptions. The results of the disaster inspire not only the need for improved supply chain resilience and enhanced corporate social responsibility but also expose some untouched areas related to sustainability. For example, some businesses have managed to demonstrate sustainability commitment by transforming some of their production lines into facilities for producing medical masks or sanitizers. Our daily lives have also been considerably changed in many respects, such as people experiencing home cooking and spending more time on learning about food sustainability, due to the implementation of lockdown policies. Debate about sustainability has also been reignited: In light of COVID-19, the sustainability level of the whole world is instead ameliorated since harmful carbon emissions have declined as a consequence of the global restrictions on movement, reduced business activities and the slump in travel by air and other modes of transport.

To deal with these novel issues, the recent rapid development of Data Science, including Industry 4.0, internet of things, blockchain, data mining and machine learning, enables the visualization of logistics and supply chain management. In addition to the evolution of artificial intelligence and optimization methodology, the academic community and industrial sector are pursuing robust and applicable decision-making to simulate real-life applications. In the state-of-the-art data analytics and modelling methods, researchers and practitioners can better manage the future supply chain goods flow, information flow, and cash flow decisions in consideration of sustainability and potential risk. It is worth noting that the first two flows in the supply chain management domain have been well studied for several decades, while the research on supply chain cash flow is lagging behind but has been receiving increasing interest since the last economic downturn in 2008. As we all know, COVID-19 severely has impaired the global economic growth rate and damaged the smooth cash flow in global supply chains. Thus, it is reasonable to forecast that a supply chain’s sustainability cannot be achieved without building up resilient and robust cash flows.

The emerging research methods provide decision-making support, problem/data-driven supply chain management and data analytics with regard to options decisions. Respective benefits can be brought to various industry applications, including urban and rural intelligent transport systems, maritime logistics, air traffic planning and control, sustainable supply chain design, financial supply chain management, manufacturing, agriculture production as well as across multiple industries.

This Special Issue aims to provide original and up-to-date contributions and to review and survey research and development on logistics and sustainable supply chain management which focuses on advanced technologies and COVID-19-induced problems and provides initiatives for the solutions from academia in the corresponding practical scenarios. This Special Issue attempts to stimulate and promote the development of novel approaches in enabling sustainable logistics and supply chain management solutions. Contributions are invited for leading and high-quality papers on new ideas, methods, and technologies.

Topics can include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Efficiency and flexibility modelling in logistics planning.
• Energy consumption control in logistics.
• Supply chain design, optimization and data-driven modelling with consideration of sustainability.
• Data and the applications to technology improvement and optimization in logistics solutions.
• Machine learning in GHG emission predictions.
• Data mining for energy performance improvement in manufacturing.
• Big data analytics for environment pollution analysis in energy consumption.
• Mathematical programming for combinatory optimization problems in logistics and supply chains.
• Collaborative modelling for multi-objective optimization for sustainable
• Sustainable supply chain finance.
• Equilibrium and balance between sustainability and supply chain management.
• Optimizing the performance of the operations–finance–sustainability interface in the presence of huge disasters such as COVID-19.
• Pandemics and sustainable supply chain management.
• Flexibility modelling in logistics planning and supply chain design considering the COVID-19-induced problems such as the distribution of vaccination spots.
• Risk management in logistics and supply chain management.
• Application of multi-criteria decision-making approaches for the modelling of sustainable supply chains.
• The role of digital technologies in sustainable supply chain management.
• Post-pandemic challenges in sustainable supply chain management.

Prof. Dr. Felix T. S. Chan
Dr. Jitender Madaan
Prof. Dr. Sen Liu
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 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. 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 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.