How to balance economic, environmental and social impacts generated by climate change is one of the central issues addressed by sustainability. Those impacts are the major challenges faced for every company and institution in the world if they wish to survive and prevail competitive. In this setting, managers are aware that there are a lack of mathematical models and solution approaches, and in particular, operational research (OR) approaches, to properly address a wide variety of problems in the sustainability domain such as energy and water usage efficiency, scarce resource management, reverse, recycling, remanufacturing and waste management, reducing carbon emissions, disaster management, and emerging problems such as migration crisis management . Traditional strategic, tactical and operational problems frequently studied by practitioners and researchers of OR need to be revised, revisited and studied in this new perspective to generate a new and enhanced body of knowledge able to tackle the needs for a sustainable society. Scheduling, Vehicle routing, Facility Location, Supply Chain Design, Warehouse Management, Capacity Expansion and Production Planning Problems, are some of the classical OR problems where mathematical models and solution methods have to integrate all three sustainable perspectives.
During the last 20 years, sustainability concept has been evolving and current literature is rich of conceptual, qualitative and quantitative studies addressing the questions of sustainability. Howbeit there is a need to go beyond, to extend current mathematical models and built new ones that effectively address the challenges posed by sustainability, and to develop algorithms able to handle the computational complexity of this new set of problems.
This special issue has the objective to compile cutting-edge research on mathematical modelling and solution methods to generate a new body of knowledge to assist policy and decision-makers in the pathway of constructing a sustainable society. Researchers should consider this special issue as a unique opportunity to advance the understanding of the OR Community and to incentive a broader group of researchers to make outstanding contributions to achieve sustainability.
Interested authors are challenged and encouraged to modify, expand present theories and to develop a new body of knowledge that mitigate climate change and support the transition towards a more sustainable society. Therefore, high-quality papers, which propose new theoretical insights, develop new conceptual frameworks, create new solution approaches and examine emerging practices, are welcomed. Methodologies to address complex problems should be built upon OR tools and techniques.
Manuscript Preparation and Submission
Submitted manuscripts will need to conform to the usual high standard requirements of EJOR and will be peer reviewed as normal. Prospective authors are asked to follow the EJOR guide for authors and submit their papers via the EES (http://ees.elsevier.com/ejor).
Publication Schedule
Paper Submission Due: July 31, 2016
Final Decision: April 30, 2017
Special Issue Editors
The Editors of this special issue of EJOR are:
– Ernesto DR Santibanez Gonzalez (Managing Guest Editor, Universidad de Talca/Federal University of Southern Bahia, santibanez.ernesto@gmail.com)
– Joe Zhu (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, jzhu@wpi.edu)
– Simone Zanoni (Università degli Studi di Brescia, simone.zanoni@unibs.it)
– Nelson Maculan (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, maculan@cos.ufrj.br)