Welcome to the first issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering (IJSE) in 2017. This issue marks our first decade of publication. We are very excited to announce that IJSE is now part of the Emerging Sources Citation Index. This means that IJSE is now fully searchable and indexed in the ‘Web of Science’ which should lead to better exposure and higher citation rates for our authors.
Another notable event in growth of the Journal is the publication of the first Conference Special Issue, based on the ‘3rd International Conference on Sustainable Design and Manufacturing’, which took place in Crete - Greece in 2016. Conferences, symposiums, workshops and other gatherings play a vital role in cross fertilisation of research, in particular for younger academics and researchers, and going forward we plan to continue to support key events which are aligned with the scope of IJSE through publication of the best selected contributions. Furthermore, through development of a simple form, we have streamlined our procedures for those who wish to act as a ‘Guest Editor’ of a subject-based Special Issue of IJSE.
We have continued to work on improving the efficiency of the reviewing process, and are grateful to our reviewers for submitting their reviews on time and to our authors for their patience during the reviewing process of their manuscript. In this respect, we will be asking authors to clearly indicate in their manuscripts where reviewers’ and editorial comments have been taken into consideration and for those papers categorised as ‘Major Revision’ and ‘Reject & Resubmit’, the modifications to be summarised within a separate supporting document (marked as ‘author’s response to reviewers/editors comments’) to aid with the re-reviewing process. In addition, we are unable to guarantee completion of reviewing for those authors who are in need of publication within a specific and stringent timetable as part of their fulfilment of postgraduate study requisites. Finally, due to our publisher’s request, we are also unable to forward manuscripts that are suffering from poor English or formatting errors to our Production Team at Taylor & Francis.
To showcase the diverse but at the same time complementary range of sustainability publications in IJSE, this 10th anniversary issue presents five research papers exploring the intricacies of modelling methodologies and tools to support industrial sustainability. These papers cover a broad range of products from food packaging to hybrid electric vehicles.
The first article by Moon is a review paper that considers simulation modelling for sustainability using different methodologies. It is intended to aid researchers as a practical resource of modelling approaches. The second paper by Ardeshirilajimi and Azadivar investigates the optimum production parameters for a reverse supply chain for the manufacture of primary products and remanufacture of commercial returns.
Next the paper by Ingarao et al. presents an analytical methodology to explore an Italian perspective of life cycle energy and CO2 emissions of food packaging. Taking advantage of a real case study, some crucial aspects concerning energy and resource efficiency of packaging systems are analysed.
The fourth paper by Gu and Gao focuses on the impacts of production disruption in an integrated Remanufacturing/Manufacturing supply chain by studying different methods for management of such disruptions. They propose new methods for setting multi-echelon inventory levels and making of back-up plans, and suggest further research directions.
Finally, the paper by Pirmoradi et al. proposes an efficient product family design method for mass customisation of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles’ powertrains motivated by the need to maximise customer satisfaction for the replacement of conventional vehicles with this new technology.
The Editorial Team at IJSE looks forward to facilitating and supporting the next generation of sustainable engineering research in our second decade of publication. We are thankful for the continuous support of our authors, reviewers, and editorial board members.
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