The urgent need for sustainable development is imposing radical changes in the way manufacturing and logistics systems are designed and implemented. This urgent requirement has arisen due to several established and emerging causes: Environmental concerns, diminishing nonrenewable resources, stricter legislation and inflated energy costs, increasing consumer preference for environmentally friendly products, etc. Moreover, the overall sustainability in industrial activities of manufacturing companies must be achieved at the same time that they face unprecedented levels of global competition. Many research works have been reported in the Intelligent Manufacturing and Logistics Systems literature, proposing different approaches to tackling sustainability at different levels of the whole manufacturing and logistics system. Nevertheless, there are open problems that still remain unsolved and require urgent attention from academia and industry practitioners. The objective of this Special Issue is to provide a snapshot of the status, potential, challenges, and recent developments of intelligent solutions for sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems. We invite researchers to contribute original research articles as well as review articles that will stimulate the continuing efforts to improve the current state-of-the-art within the field.
Keywords: sustainable optimization techniques for manufacturing and logistics system operations; intelligent approaches for green supply chains; heuristics and metaheuristics algorithms; developments for sustainable intelligent manufacturing and logistics systems; intelligent theoretical models for sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems; application of distributed intelligent models and solutions for sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems.