Sustainable and Safe Process Design and Operation

Dear Colleagues, 

In the process industries, operators are eager to know how to progress their operations safely and economically. At the same time, regulators are keen to learn how to develop regulations, standards, and guidance that can assure sustainability and safety concerning environmental and social aspects. In essence, both sustainability and safety-related studies focus on the same three primary elements: people, planet, and profits. The analyses performed in these studies are often crosslinked. Thus, it would be beneficial to consider sustainability and safety factors integrally in process design and operation. However, the existing literature does not reflect this perspective well. 

Complications arise as engineering and regulatory schemes fall increasingly under technical, economic, environmental, human, and societal constraints. Intensive and extensive research is demanded by both operators and regulators to acquire a better understanding of sustainability and safety analytics within an integrated framework. 

For the context mentioned above, the Special Issue aims to consolidate the literature on integrated sustainability and safety analytics related to process design and operation and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art of challenges and potential solutions. The systems of interest may include chemical, mining, energy, logistics and transportation, and waste treatment systems. This Special Issue will invite original papers dealing with but not limited to the following topics:

• Process sustainability and safety indicators and indices;
• Decision-support methods and tools for improving process sustainability and safety;
• Regulatory provisions emphasizing process sustainability and safety;
• Integrated sustainability and safety analytics for process systems; and
• Innovation in data collection and analytics for process sustainability and safety research.

Prof. Genserik Reniers
Dr. Ming Yang
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.

• process safety
• process sustainability
• risk management
• impact assessment
• consequence assessment
• regulatory provision
• data analytics
• risk governance
• safety-by-design
• sustainability-by-design