The guest editors Ricardo Simões Santos, José Miguel Soares, João Carlos de Oliveira Matias e Vitor Anes are inviting for submission to the Special Issue “Sustainable Approaches for Industrial Sectors”, with deadline up to 31st March 2022.
Special discounts can be granted if needed. For more information, please contact one of the guest editors: ricardosimoessantos84@ua.pt
Presentation of the Special Issue:
In the last few decades, the increasing globalization of markets, and therefore the rising competition between economic agents, has redefined how our economy and industry work, motivating the emergence of concepts associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (also known as Industry 4.0) and open innovation, given the demands in terms of efficiency and effectiveness required from the organizations.
On the other hand, environmental concerns, and therefore the need to reach a green economy, have driven society to develop new paradigms and concepts, such as circular economy, eco-innovation, industrial symbiosis, and green products.
There is an understanding that the combination of these concepts leads us towards reaching sustainable development more rapidly by promoting social and economic development while at the same time ensuring the protection of the environment for the next generations.
Furthermore, it has been recognized that the underlying drivers and technologies of Industry 4.0 (towards agile smart manufacturing) combined with open innovation policies and measures might help to promote circular economy towards a more sustainable industry, which brings the need to tackle and explore the numerous synergies between them.
However, the existing research that addresses and, most importantly, integrates such issues to define a set of measures and policies to reach a more sustainable industry is still very scant. Therefore, there are plenty of research issues needing to be addressed.
In this context, the purpose of this Special Issue is to encourage researchers to explore the synergies between the paradigms of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and sustainability in order to promote and speed up the industrial transition into a circular economy by simultaneously promoting the acquisition of sustainable competitive advantage for organizations to enable them to respond quickly to market needs in the future.
To address this area of research, this Special Issue calls for papers that present applied work regarding these issues. Contributions concerning theoretical approaches are also welcome. Topics of interest include but not are limited to the following:
- Sustainable development approaches in industry;
- Green product development in open innovation;
- Green technologies;
- Green industrial processes;
- Industrial symbiosis;
- Quality 4.0;
- Predictive maintenance;
- Clean production;
- Sustainable life cycle assessment;
- Decision-making in quality management;
- Sustainable industrial energy systems;
- Synergies between Industry 4.0 and circular economy;
- Risk management in open innovation projects;
- Simulation;
- Carbon taxes;
- Cases studies.
Sustainability is an international, interdisciplinary, academic, peer-reviewed and open-access journal on environmental, cultural, economic and social sustainability, with an impact factor of 2.576, indexed on the Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Science platforms) ) and Scopus.