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This study aims to identify blockchain-related innovation trends that can improve trust networks in a smart city's transport and supply chain networks. Trust networks are crucial in building and maintaining the trust of citizens in smart cities. By promoting transparency and accountability, facilitating collaboration and innovation, enhancing citizen participation and protecting privacy and security, trust networks can help to ensure that smart cities are developed and implemented in a responsible and sustainable way. A systematic literature review identifies 60 conceptual and empirical studies. This research focuses on the current problems and developing procurement and supply chain strategy and the potential benefits of using blockchain in these areas. It suggests ways for the smart city's transport and supply chain networks to utilise blockchain to improve operations and supply chain strategy and identifies innovation trends related to blockchain. The study also includes a systematic literature review and Blockchain Transformation and Influence model as the basis to enhance trust networks in the supply chain.

Supply chains deliver goods and services between shippers and receivers, covering collection, transportation, distribution as well as their handling and storage in between. In particular, transportation services are carried out by different transport modes. In some modern supply chains, different categories of air cargo carriers – combinations, freighter-only, and/or integrators – provide critical transport services.

This chapter develops a methodology for estimating the performance of supply chains served by an air cargo carrier network. The methodology is based on indicators of infrastructure use, technical/technological level, operational factors, economic factors, and environmental performance. This proposed methodology is applied to estimate performance of supply chains served by an integrated air cargo carrier – FedEx Express – operating a single hub in the US domestic air network. Results indicate that the methodology may be useful for estimation of overall supply chain performance under the condition that relevant data are available.

“Mirror Worlds” were suggested by David Gelernter based on a bold assertion: “You will look into a computer screen and see reality.” With mirror worlds, managers could be proactive, anticipating what might happen and acting accordingly, instead of waiting till events happen and then reacting. This paper extends the notion of mirrors worlds to supply chain management. In the case of supply chain management, managers could test the impact of making changes in their supply chains to study the impact.

However, mirror worlds could be extended to help actually monitor and manage supply chains to respond and adapt to changes in the world that affected the supply chain. In particular, mirror worlds could be “real” worlds if control for some of the activities between supply chain participants is in effect “turned over” to the mirror world. In that case, the mirror world would show the actual world, with the system making many of the decisions.

Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured supply chain practices, lack of awareness of the implications of the sustainability concept and failure to recycle poultry wastes. The current research thus attempts to develop an integrated supply chain model in the context of poultry industry in Bangladesh. The study considers both sustainability and supply chain issues in order to incorporate them in the poultry supply chain. By placing the forward and reverse supply chains in a single framework, existing problems can be resolved to gain economic, social and environmental benefits, which will be more sustainable than the present practices.

The theoretical underpinning of this research is ‘sustainability’ and the ‘supply chain processes’ in order to examine possible improvements in the poultry production process along with waste management. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and ‘design science’ methods with the support of system dynamics (SD) and the case study methods. Initially, a mental model is developed followed by the causal loop diagram based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation techniques. The causal model helps to understand the linkages between the associated variables for each issue. Finally, the causal loop diagram is transformed into a stock and flow (quantitative) model, which is a prerequisite for SD-based simulation modelling. A decision support system (DSS) is then developed to analyse the complex decision-making process along the supply chains.

The findings reveal that integration of the supply chain can bring economic, social and environmental sustainability along with a structured production process. It is also observed that the poultry industry can apply the model outcomes in the real-life practices with minor adjustments. This present research has both theoretical and practical implications. The proposed model’s unique characteristics in mitigating the existing problems are supported by the sustainability and supply chain theories. As for practical implications, the poultry industry in Bangladesh can follow the proposed supply chain structure (as par the research model) and test various policies via simulation prior to its application. Positive outcomes of the simulation study may provide enough confidence to implement the desired changes within the industry and their supply chain networks.

Introduction: This study investigates the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on the sustainability of the supply chain. It investigates how modern supply networks and procedures were equipped for such a catastrophe, and the pandemic’s effects on the environment, highlighting the significance of studying resilience and sustainability concurrently.

Purpose: The study acknowledges the importance of environmental sustainability for businesses and the need to examine trends in organisational, customer, policy, and distribution networks.

Need for the Study: The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted supply chains. This study aims to provide insight into the long-term repercussions of the crisis and the importance of incorporating environmental considerations.

Methodology: The study uses a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on supply networks and environmental sustainability indices. Data from industry reports, governmental publications, polls, and qualitative research techniques have been gathered.

Findings: The results of this study advance our understanding of how to preserve supply chains in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the need for enhanced resilience and sustainability measures, expose the flaws and weaknesses of contemporary supply networks, and uncover developing patterns and tactics in customer behaviour, policy frameworks, distribution networks, and supply chain management.

Practical Implications: The COVID-19 pandemic has provided businesses, decision makers, and researchers with guidance on handling its potential and challenges – increasing the supply chain’s resistance to future interruptions, incorporating environmentally friendly practises, developing policies to support resilient and sustainable supply chains, adapting to changing consumer tastes, increasing effectiveness, and minimising the environmental impact of distribution networks.

This chapter proposes a multiobjective model to design a Closed Loop Supply Chain (CLSC) network. The first objective is to minimize the total cost of the network, while the second objective is to minimize the carbon emission resulting from production, transportation, and disposal processes using carbon cap and carbon tax regularity policies. In the third objective, we maximize the service level of retailers by using maximum covering location as a measure of service level. To model the proposed problem, a physical programming approach is developed. This work contributes to the literature in designing an optimum CLSC network considering the service level objective and product substitution.

Food supply chain transparency and traceability is very important to address the issue regarding quality and safety. In traditional tracing system, with increasing the complexity of supply chain making product recalls difficult to manage and putting human lives at risk. To eliminate such types of risks, blockchain technology gives more efficient and reliable system for food tracing. Recently, there is an exponential rise in adoption of blockchain technology and most disparate IOT (Internet of things) devices in agriculture and food supply chain. It is an evolving technology that comforts the food supply chains by providing transparent data records and manage the food movement in the chain using distributed (P2P) network. That is more secured and there's no need for third party verifications. Our focus in this research will be on the Indian wheat supply chain and issues related to food losses caused by a lack of transparency and traceability. In order to improve the transparency of the wheat supply chain, we created an end-to-end smart wheat supply chain solution that combines blockchain technology, NFC tags, IoTs, and smart contracts. The solution is supported by entity relationship diagrams, information and money flow sequence diagrams, and a blockchain network diagram. We also used a security algorithm and the “NFC-Tag writer by NXP” program to validate and assess our system. This work could serve as a springboard for more in-depth research in this area. Depending on the existing situation in the industry, this research can also advise corporate procedures to deploy blockchain-based applications in the supply chain and logistics industry.

This study examines the diffusion process of corporate sustainability (CS) in the global automotive industry. It discusses the different roles played by the automakers, as the industry’s focal firms, in diffusing CS strategies throughout their respective supply networks. Studies have explained this phenomenon as being the result of the higher levels of stakeholder exposure faced by focal firms, which generate higher levels of supplier sustainability risk. In this context, the authors examine the effects of three network-related firm characteristics – resource dominance, resource substitutability, and network centrality – in determining the effectiveness of a firm in diffusing CS in its network. For that purpose, we present a theoretical framework from which we derive a set of hypotheses and test them on a sample of the global automotive supply network containing 10,726 firms linked by 45,044 inter-firm relationships. The results lend significant support to the argument that these network-related firm attributes are crucial mechanisms to the process of diffusion of CS strategies in a supply network, thus contributing to extant literatures in strategic management, international business, and sustainable supply chain management.

A circular economy perspective embraces a systemic, cradle-to-cradle notion that everything is designed to be reused as long as possible and then recaptured and repurposed when reuse is no longer possible. Designing for a circular economy ecosystem requires a holistic, integrative viewpoint, spanning all aspects of design and development and considering many supply chain actors, far beyond that of traditional supply chains. This edited book adopts a biomimetic lens, highlighting the need for cross-industry flows and need for different actors (beyond producers and consumers) in circular value cycles. Enablers such as incentives and/or legislation are also discussed. While biomimicry provides the structure for organizing this book, individual chapters build on other theoretical lenses and concepts, such as stakeholder theory, etc. The intent is to move beyond a dyadic (buyer–supplier) view, embracing a holistic network or ecosystem view, to consider a cross-industry system perspective, where there is a diversity of actors (covering four actor groups: producers, consumers, scavengers, and decomposers) needed for a working ecosystem. This edited book offers a comprehensive overview of system components and actors, including how the circular economy adds value, the role of producers and consumers, the spectrum of recovery possibilities to return products back to the consumption supply chain, and the essential role of information management.