Innovative solutions for sustainable supply chains: An introduction

Abstract

Design, development, and effective management of sustainable supply chains of the twenty-first century has become a raison d’être for most businesses today. The rising concerns of people for the socioeconomic and environmental impact of supply chains together with the unprecedented technological developments and innovations have made the management of supply chains as a complex, dynamic task: several stakeholders are involved, regulatory regimes keep on changing, and uncertainties are abound. Therefore, the primary aim of this book is to disseminate the roles of various perspectives and applications of modeling approaches aimed at improving the performance of sustainable supply chains. The key focus is on “innovative solutions” based on system dynamics, econometric, and agent-based models. In this chapter, we present a preview of 11 contributions, 6 describing unique perspectives and 5 demonstrating the utility of various modeling approaches, unified by a common goal of improving the performance of sustainable supply chains.