Environment, Energy, and Sustainability

The Environment, Energy, and Sustainability area will publish papers that creatively apply Operations Research methods to address important environmental problems and pressing sustainable development challenges; and to solve problems in all areas of energy and natural resources.

Problem arising in these areas are complex because they often involve multiple objectives and stakeholders, great uncertainty, and large systems that ignore political boundaries. Problems are also often interdisciplinary involving inputs from engineers, economists and computer scientists as well as traditional OR modelling. We welcome submissions from interdisciplinary teams.

Topics of interest (and the area editor to whom they should be addressed) include:

• Planning and control of systems in traditional areas such as forestry, mining, water resources, and forward and reverse supply chain management (Toktay);
• Analysis of novel operations and design problems arising in growth areas such as renewable energy, organic agriculture, green chemistry, and sustainable mobility (Toktay);
• Formulation and analysis of operations and design questions relating to sustainable development issues such as fair trade and microfinance (Toktay);
• Planning and control of systems in energy-related industries, such as capacity planning and the operation of large-scale networks for gas and electricity (Anderson);
• Design of markets for electricity, gas, and other resources; and market-based approaches for environmental issues such as emissions trading (Anderson);
• Design of advanced systems for energy management such as smart grids (Anderson);
• Policy analysis in the above areas that recognizes operational and system design factors that impact policy outcomes, and that makes concrete policy recommendations.

There are broadly three types of paper that are of interest. First we will publish papers that show the use of Operations Research in real-world settings in a way that is likely to influence operational or policy decisions or has resulted in policy recommendations. Such contributions should demonstrate both innovative use of OR methods and the relevance of the results to real problems. Papers that incorporate environmental or social impact measurement are strongly encouraged. A second type of paper involves a methodological extension that responds to new or unusual aspects of the decisions being addressed. The significance of such methodological contributions depends on the credibility of the underlying models and assumptions, and mathematical correctness alone is not sufficient to warrant publication. A third type of contribution involves the consolidation and insightful appraisal of past work, and evaluations of emerging problems that could benefit from the OR community's attention.

This area is committed to attracting significant contributions from within and outside the OR community that are of potential interest to OR researchers and practitioners, and to provide timely evaluations of such contributions. Submission will be prescreened by the area editors for relevance and significance. We are committed to providing expeditious handling of submitted papers and a first review no later than four months from submission.

Associate Editors: Baris Ata, James Bushnell, Charles Corbett, Gregory DeCroix, Shijie Deng, Jan C. Fransoo, Alexandra Newman, Andy Philpott, Erica Plambeck, and Nicola Secomandi