Dear Colleagues,

In recent times, there have been vertiginous changes made to industrial systems, giving rise to profound transformations in the way decision-making processes are approached in operation environments. These modifications are associated with the growing level of digitization of processes and operations, which increases and improves the decision-making capacity due to a higher level of information being available. Likewise, this digitization allows for the integration into the same management system of tools capable of processing data and solving situations in an autonomous way and in an optimal manner. Therefore, these transformations allow for the integration of different operational research tools that are needed at each operations management level.

On the other hand, the growing demands to reduce the environmental impact of industrial operations have generated a specific need for the design of tools that allow the optimization of processes in order to ensure sustainability. In this Special Issue, a sustainable approach aligned with the UN SDG agenda is considered, and it is expected to encourage the development of OR methods and tools capable of addressing these needs.

For this Special Issue, we encourage authors to make contributions that highlight the most advanced and innovative ideas addressing operations planning problems. Operations planning can address short-term problems, as well as tactical or strategic decisions. Contributions that manage to add theoretical contributions to the existing body of knowledge are welcome, as are works on applications and study cases where the application of operations research is innovative. 

Potential topics of OR applications include, but are not limited to:

• Intelligent manufacturing systems;
• Intelligent operations management;
• Data-driven production planning;
• OR methods applied to green manufacturing;
• Machine learning approaches in manufacturing systems operations;
• Operations management;
• Sustainable management;
• Cyber-physical production systems;
• Analytics models and inventory control;
• Production networks;
• Assembly line and production planning;
• Scheduling problems;
• Decision making in supply chain management;
• Digital twin implementations in production environments;
• Closed-loop supply chains.

Dr. Daniel A. Rossit
Prof. Dr. Frank Werner
Guest Editors

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• operations research
• production planning
• supply chain, optimization
• operations Management
• decision making