Journal: OR Spectrum, Submission Deadline: 31 December 2008

Consumers require high quality, safe, healthy and convenient food. Focus shifts to fresh as well as more value-added ready-to-eat products. As a result, the product variety has increased significantly. The food sector shows a number of distinct features such as the susceptibility of agricultural production to environmental impact factors such as the climate, an often rapidly declining quality of the products, production processes which show both continuous and batch characteristics, the generation of by-products and severe food safety and sustainability requirements.
In close cooperation with engineering and the natural sciences, Operations Research can contribute substantially to the decision making for numerous specific problems arising in the food sector. It may also support the current industry efforts of a farm-to-fork integration in food supply chains. The primary objective of this special issue is to reflect the recent developments made in this respect and to examine research issues concerned with the analysis and decision support at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels.

Topics include (but are not limited to) areas such as the following:

• Design of food production and distribution systems
• Advanced Planning in the food sector
• Application of OR to problems in agriculture
• Risk assessment, safety management and traceability in food supply chains
• Detailed planning and scheduling of processing operations
• Shelf-life and perishable inventory management
• Logistics execution and transportation management
• Demand and revenue management in the food industries
• Sustainability, such as environmental issues in production and distribution, reverse and closed-loop supply chains, animal friendliness

Please submit to one of the two editors of the special issue by 31 December 2008. Papers must comply with the formatting requirements of OR Spectrum. The target publication date for the printed special issue is November 2009.

Editors special issue

Prof. Dr. Martin Grunow
Technical University of Denmark
Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Management
Produktionstorvet 425
2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
grunow [Email address: grunow #AT# ipl.dtu.dk - replace #AT# with @ ]

Prof.dr.ir. J.G.A.J. (Jack) van der Vorst
Wageningen University
Operations Research and Logistics Group
De Leeuwenborch (building 201)
Hollandseweg 1
6706 KN Wageningen, The Netherlands
Jack.vanderVorst [Email address: Jack.vanderVorst #AT# wur.nl - replace #AT# with @ ]