Sustainable Supply Chain and Digital Transformation

Dear Colleagues,

The economic burden of responding to sustainable development and severe socio-environmental constraints have considerably affected supply chain (SC)-related decisions. Hence, increasing integrity and flexibility and monitoring the assets across SCs has become a vital issue for sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). To do this, traditional SSCM systems have been replaced by knowledge-based systems and data-driven decision-making processes to address such complex issues. This helps SC managers make decisions on how to improve the performance of sustainable supply chains (SSCs) and apply the integrated changes effectively.

Organizations have focused on digital transformation to increase their efficiency and innovation levels in recent years. Managers seek to adopt new digital technologies (e.g., blockchain and artificial intelligence) to improve the operations of SCs with the aim of increasing sustainability. Due to the inherent features of such technologies (e.g., decentralization, traceability, and auditability), they can play a significant role in improving SSC and logistics performance to higher levels. These features can also boost transparency in SSCs and increase environmental sustainability and social responsibility by recording all information from the production place to the point of sale.

The adoption of blockchain technology and the internet of things increases the capability of real-time and continuous tracking of products in SSCs to avoid imposing extra costs on the network. Organizations also need to divert their attention to using such new technologies to create resilient SSCs facing various disruption risks. Accordingly, researchers and decision-makers have put their efforts into exploring, modeling, and analyzing existing barriers and enablers through theoretical and analytical approaches to get a successful digital transformation in SSCs.

This Special Issue (SI) aims to collect recent original research and literature review papers dealing with the adoption of new digital technologies and their impacts on SSC network and logistics performance. This SI welcomes contributions that seek to provide theoretical and analytical approaches to cope with the challenges of new technology acceptance and to guide SC managers on how they can adopt new technologies.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Optimization and modeling for digital supply chain management
• Decision and data analytics for new technologies adoption
• Artificial intelligence for smart and sustainable logistics
• Simulation of new technologies' impact on supply chain performance
• Decision support systems for blockchain technology
• Information sharing for supply chain transparency
• Smart contracts for supply chain social responsibility
• The internet of things (IoT) for supply chain traceability
• New technologies-related applications for supply chain disruptions
• Other topics that bridge the application of new technologies with supply chain sustainability

Dr. Babak Mohamadpour Tosarkani
Dr. Samuel Yousefi
Prof. Dr. Mustafa Jahangoshai Rezaee
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.

• sustainable supply chain
• logistics systems
• technology adoption
• digital transformation
• blockchain technology
• artificial intelligence in business
• data and decision analytics