Dynamics and Sustainability in International Logistics and Supply Chain Management

As logistics and supply chains (SC) deal a priori with physical movement of produced materials and products (transportation, warehousing, trans-shipment and order-picking processes, i.e., logistics) and integration and coordination of these processes with each other and with the transformation production processes (i.e., supply chain management - SCM), dynamics exists both in logistics systems and in SCs inevitably. Understanding the importance and the impact of dynamics on performance and resilience of logistics and SC systems is becoming a more and more important topic in literature and in practice [6, 7, 17, 29, 30, 48]. As modern logistics and SC systems are highly networked, integrated, and coordinated, the conventionally isolated problems of operations and logistics management evolve into networked problems, which are characterized by multi-dimensional characteristics (e.g., multi-stage, multi-period, multi-commodity, etc.) [4, 39, 44]. The existence of a great diversity of different dynamic characteristics in those problems, e.g., demand fluctuations, inventory dynamics, dynamic lot-sizes, dynamic schedules, changes in suppliers' structures, information dynamics subject to partial or full information unavailability, natural and human-driven catastrophes and attacks on logistics and SC systems can significantly impact logistics and SC performance [7, 17, 48]. The distribution of these dynamic characteristics upon different structures (organizational, functional, product-based, informational, financial, etc.) along with the coordinated and distributed decision-making (so called active decision makers, unlike in automatic systems) subject to the above-mentioned multidimensional space lead to the understanding of modern logistics and SC systems as multi-structural active systems with structure dynamics [21, 27]