Industry 4.0 for the Development of More Sustainable Decision Support Tools for Agri-Food Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Environmental and social sustainability issues in Agri-food Supply Chains (ASC), are becoming very relevant mainly due to two factors. Firstly, the increasing number of public legislation rules and technical specifications to be met and, secondly, the growing awareness throughout the different ASC members (producers, processors, distributors, retailers¿) mainly as a consequence of final clients concern about purchasing sustainable products and services (Pérez et al. 2019). This fact makes that the traditional economic-driven management methods are no longer efficient and must be accommodated to these new sustainable conditions. In order to meet this new scenario, SC decision models/methods that account for environmental and social issues must be developed. On the other hand, new technologies have emerged in the last years as a conse-quence of the ¿Industry 4.0¿ revolution. However, just a few works have addressed in which extent Industry 4.0 - related technologies have positively contributed to this new sustainable scenario in ASC management (ASCM). Due to space constraints, only environmental issues are addressed, and how these technologies have brought important and relevant impacts to environmental sustainability in the practical arena allowing the development of more sustainable decision support tools for ASCM.