Dear Colleagues,

Management of the supply chain encompasses all facets of generating customer value in today's global competitive economy. This covers new product creation, supplier selection, technology and innovation, production planning, and distribution, among other things. As a result of these issues and the ever-changing nature and growth of technology, modern supply chains face new and exciting challenges when it comes to the integration of physical and cyber systems and resilience to unpredictable events, which are critical to the operational and long-term success of organizations.

Symmetry and asymmetry exist widely in industrial applications, and logistics and supply chains are no exception. Naturally, a definition of symmetry as a continuous feature is much more complex than the discrete one. We may attempt three different ways of climbing to the summit of the symmetry/asymmetry measure. First, the geometrical characterization of symmetry through group theory tools. Second, by statistical machinery, through distribution or density functions, or by characteristic functions—for instance, measuring the symmetry degree and the skewness of different probability distributions. Third, by applying measure theory in its more recent fuzzy iteration.

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques can be divided into two major groups. The first is discrete MCDA, including multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT), analytic hierarchical process (AHP), analytic network process (ANP), and outranking methods, where decision-makers must evaluate a finite set of alternatives. The second is continuous MCDA, including multi-objective programming and goal programming, where there is an infinite set of alternatives.

Over the last few decades, MCDA techniques have been successfully applied to complex decision-making problems such as industrial engineering, logistics, and supply chains, to name but a few, and imprecision and uncertainty have been incorporated into the decision-making process. Fuzziness and uncertainties are often encountered in the evaluation process for various reasons, such as the complex social environment and uncertain judgments of experts. To deal with the vagueness in the determination of linguistic statements, many fuzzy extensions of MCDA are proposed with differences in the algorithm and the degree of fuzziness involved in the analysis. The fuzzy linguistic terms can be translated into various kinds of scaling: triangular fuzzy numbers, trapezoidal fuzzy sets, intuitionistic fuzzy sets, fuzzy Z-numbers, type-2 fuzzy sets, and spherical fuzzy numbers, to list only a few.

This Special Issue on Symmetry/Asymmetry in Optimization Modeling for Logistics and Supply Chain: Theory, Methods, and Applications aims to collect high-quality research studies addressing this problem, focusing on recent advances in both discrete and continuous MCDA and significant applications in logistics and supply chains.

Prof. Dr. Chia-Nan Wang
Dr. Thanh-Tuan Dang
Dr. Ngoc Ai Thy Nguyen
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. Symmetry is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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.

• symmetry and asymmetry in multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods
• symmetry and asymmetry in multi-objective decision-making (MODM)
• goal programming
• intelligent decision support systems for logistics and supply chain
• data envelopment analysis (DEA)
• optimization techniques
• weighting approach
• innovative applications of MCDA methods
• fuzzy decision theory
• fuzzy applications