Sustainability in Operations Management
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Transportation".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2022) | Viewed by 17084
Special Issue Editors
Interests: operations management; asset management; industrial maintenance; health and safety management; data fusion; condition monitoring; faults diagnosis; learning from failures; energy management; vibration-based fault detection
Interests: learning from failures and disasters using reliability techniques; decision analysis in corporate social responsibility (CSR)
Interests: sustainability and the environment; information modelling and digitisation; people/process/technology
Interests: circular economy in construction; risk management in construction projects; construction communications; virtual teams in construction; contractor prequalification and bid evaluation; decision making
Interests: management of projects
Interests: engineering project management
Interests: sustainable energy; distributed generation systems; energy access; power quality improvement
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Sustainability, as a paradigm, started in 1960s in response to concerns about air and water pollution, and natural resource depletion resulting from overuse and overpopulation. Since then, there have been global trends of integrating principles of sustainability into all sectors of the economy including their operations, activities, transactions, and services. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared framework of high-level goals, referred to as Social Development Goals (SDGs), for all sectors to engage with and contribute to sustainable development on a global scale. For example, innovative design and construction processes of infrastructure projects can embrace the circularity of construction materials, which links to goals of "Sustainable Cities and Communities", "Responsible Consumption and Production", and "Industry Innovation and Infrastructure", whereas infrastructure operations can be planned to achieve social equity in delivering social value at a national level, which links to a wide range of SDGs including, for example, "Good Health and Wellbeing", "Quality Education", "Decent Work and Economic Growth" to mention a few.
The industrial revolutions significantly enhanced the abilities of organisations to improve the quality of human life through more precise and faster approaches that aided the conversion of inputs to outputs. Traditional operations processes were mainly based on the application of narrowly skilled experts, several unskilled workers, large inter-stage storage facilities and complex-single-purpose equipment for producing huge volumes of standard items. There is no doubt that these strategies, coupled with other approaches, such as reactive repairs of failed assets, generally boosted outputs at the time that most markets were monopolistic in nature. However, recent shifts in paradigm from a producer-driven to mostly consumer-driven system due to globalisation and technological advancements have led to the emergence of concepts that eliminate waste. The increasing need for adopting sustainable business practices have opened new research avenues in the field of operations management. To introduce better economic, social, and environmental sustainability practices, operations management researchers draw upon the mainstream management theories and put them all through the sustainability lenses. For example, for a long time, the people side of operations management was concerned with how to fit people into jobs and how to fit jobs for people. However, social sustainable practices bring a whole new concept of concerns for communities in which the business is operating. Existing research is lacking in problematizing how the notion of social sustainability is constructed and how it could enhance operations management practices. Addressing this research gap requires approaching sustainability as a context and not an add-on to well-established practices.
Irrespective of the sector or discipline that forms the context through which operations management is considered, the impact of the recent global restrictions imposed by the recent COVID-19 pandemic on core facets of operations management, such as productivity, safety, asset management and supply chain resilience, which account for the movement of goods, services, people and knowledge, must be considered in tandem. This, coupled with globalisation and rapidly advancements in technology, makes it imperative for organisations to swiftly deduce resilient mechanisms that can adapt to, respond to and recovery from global operational challenges. Therefore, this Special Issue “Sustainability in Operations” aims to summarize the state of the art of the research and practice that can advance the resilience of industrial operations. The Special Issue includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:
- Asset management.
- Reliability, availability and maintainability.
- Supply chain management and resilience.
- Human error, human reliability and organisational factor analysis.
- People resilience and sustainable reintegration.
- Learning from failures and analysis.
- Industrial internet of things.
- Digital twin.
- Operations management strategy.
- Operations management theories.
- Safety in operations.
- Data fusion and hybridisation.
- Big data and data analytics.
- Process optimisation and waste minimisation in operations.
- Through-life cycle management.
- Operations design and innovation.
- Lean and six sigma.
- Continuous improvement in operations management.
- Quality assurance and quality control in operations management.
- Reliability centred maintenance.
- Total productive maintenance.
- Total quality management.
- Operations information and knowledge management systems.
- Major overhauls, outages, shutdowns and turnarounds (MoOSTs).
- Workload management.
- Planning and scheduling.
- Forecasting and prediction.
- Circular economy.
- Sustainable educational operations.
- Sustainable construction operations.
- Renewable energy operations and marine systems.
The purpose of the Special Issue is to collect original research papers, review articles and case studies. Although the emphasis of this Special Issue is on practice and implementation, we also welcome fundamental studies.
Dr. Akilu Yunusa-Kaltungo
Prof. Dr. Ashraf Labib
Dr. Eric Lou
Dr. Mohamed Abadi
Dr. Elika Aminian
Dr. Amir Rahbarimanesh
Dr. Nabila Ahmed Rufa’i
Prof. Sulaiman O Olanrewaju
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.
Keywords
- Operations Management Strategy
- Operations Design and Innovation
- COVID-19
- Sustainability
- Circular Economy
- Renewable Energy
