The Coronavirus Pandemic’s Impact on the Design and Management of Production Systems and Supply Chains

SPECIAL ISSUE ANNOUNCEMENT

The Coronavirus Pandemic’s Impact on the Design and Management of Production Systems and Supply Chains

AIM OF SPECIAL ISSUE:

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 disease caused by the new coronavirus first detected in Wuhan China, and its rapid spread around the globe, rekindled the attention of the world towards the effects of such epidemics on people’s everyday life. This happened in the past when the “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome” (SARS) in 2003 in mainland China, the “Middle East Respiratory Syndrome” (MERS) in 2012 in Saudi Arabia, and the MERS in 2015 in South Korea (de Wit et al., 2016) took the scene.

As observed, this kind of epidemic can rapidly spread by a group of infectious agents through several methods of interactions and threaten the health of many people in a short time (Medina, 2018). These kinds of viruses, and their induced related epidemic crises, are having a great impact on every aspect of the economy, finance and society, raising new challenges in the field of epidemic disease prevention and mitigation.

Specifically, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought to light a new dimension in the interpretation of “sustainability” and “resilience” of production systems and supply chains. As to industrial production and distribution, suddenly the need arose for:

1. Safer production systems which apply new (or advanced) standards for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), new logics of functioning and organization, and new shift planning methods in order to prevent occupational exposure to health-threatening factors or diseases such as COVID-19. This has also affected those industrial sectors where eye, face and respiratory protections were not required before the coronavirus emergence.
2. More flexible and more responsive production systems and supply chains, able to easily adapt to the profound and rapid changes that have occurred since the new virus emerged (controlled and reduced personal contacts in order to limit human-to-human transmission, rapid variation in volumes and prices, new marketing, financial and logistic policies, and so on).

This Special Issue of Computers & Industrial Engineering aims to attract world-leading research which may help to understand the impact of the coronavirus on production systems and supply chains. Further aims are to identify new potential work-related exposure and health risks, to develop new solutions for increasing safety of production systems, and flexibility and resilience of domestic and cross-border supply chains.

Contributions are expected, but not limited, to the following topics:

• evidence-based analysis of the pandemic’s impact on modern supply chains and production systems.
• novel safety management practices and strategies to prevent rapid epidemic diffusion in production environments (both goods and services production).
• optimized workforce management models and organizational methods to limit inter-personal contacts and disease transmission.
• innovative models for highly responsive PPE supply chains and PPE production facilities.
• novel design and management strategies for resilient supply chains and production systems.
• new supply chain sustainability models to encompass epidemic disease related issues.
• reconfiguration models for supply chains during emergency management.

Methodologies adopted cover the areas of classical decision-making approaches, including analytical modelling and combinatorial optimization, stochastic modelling, statistical analysis, simulation of complex systems, dynamic control methods, multi-attribute models and so on. Review papers are also welcome.

References

de Wit, E.; van Doremalen, N.; Falzarano, N.; Munster, V.J. (2016), “SARS and MERS: recent insights into emerging coronaviruses”, Nature Reviews Microbiology, vol. 14, pp. 523-534.

Medina, R.A. (2018), “1918 influenza virus: 100 years on, are we prepared against the next influenza pandemic?”, Nature Reviews Microbiology, vol. 16, pp. 61-62.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Manuscripts should be submitted through the publisher’s online system, Elsevier Editorial System (EES) at http://ees.elsevier.com/caie/. Please follow the instructions described in the “Guide for Authors”, given on the main page of the EES website. Please make sure you select “Special Issue” as Article Type and “Pandemic’s Impact” as Section/Category. In preparing their manuscript, the authors are asked to closely follow the “Instructions to Authors”. Submissions will be reviewed according to C&IE’s rigorous standards and procedures through a double-blind peer review by at least two qualified reviewers.

GUEST EDITORS:

Eleonora Bottani (eleonora.bottani@unipr.it)
University of Parma, Department of Engineering and Architecture,
Viale delle Scienze 181/A, 43124 Parma, Italy

Elisa Gebennini (elisa.gebennini@unimercatorum.it)
Universitas Mercatorum, Faculty of Economics,
Piazza Mattei 10, 00186 Roma, Italy

Donato Morea (donato.morea@unimercatorum.it)
Universitas Mercatorum, Faculty of Economics,
Piazza Mattei 10, 00186 Roma, Italy

Teresa Murino (murino@unina.it)
Department of Chemical, Materials and Industrial Production Engineering, University of Naples “Federico II”
Piazzale V. Tecchio 80, 80125 Napoli, Italy

DEADLINES (tentative)

Deadline for paper submission: October 31^st, 2020

First round of review: January 31^st, 2021

Notification to the authors: February 15^th, 2021

Revision of papers: April 15^th, 2021

Second round of review: July 15^th, 2021

Final decision notification: July 30^th, 2021

Expected publication of the special issue: last quarter of 2021