Dear Colleagues,

The successful enrolment of Industry 4.0 into worldwide engineering processes is highly dependent on advanced decision-making techniques, whose capabilities to model, evaluate, and optimize highly dynamic, sustainability-oriented properties are increasingly applied in everyday life, presenting symmetry between them. Thus, improving social, environmental, and economic prospects can lead to a better new world. The globalized market and digitally supported industry, regardless of the production type, from the most basic job shop to mass personalized production, aim to optimize engineering processes. In the era of Industry 4.0, where the high complexity of engineering processes is reflected in symmetry with multicriteria decision making, optimization problems need to be solved with advanced evolutionary computation methods, complex system simulations, and new visual computing approaches. Personalized products in Industry 4.0 manufacturing systems are represented by the high-mix low-volume production type, for which adequate evaluation of different optimization parameters is crucial. The impact of highly dynamic processes (rapidly changing global demounts and new global paradigms) needs to be further explored in order to sustainably justify engineering processes in globalized markets.

This Special Issue on “Advanced Decision-Making Techniques in Dynamic Industry 4.0 Sustainable Engineering Processes” aims to incorporate recent developments in decision-making techniques, Industry 4.0, and sustainable engineering processes. Topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Evolutionary techniques;
• Optimization techniques;
• Numerical techniques;
• Decision theory and methods;
• Decision support systems;
• Complex systems and methodology;
• Dynamic simulation of systems;
• Manufacturing systems;
• Production planning and scheduling;
• Industrial processes;
• Operations research, business systems simulation;
• Intelligent simulation;
• Knowledge-based simulation;
• Real-time systems;
• Visual computing methods;
• Collaborative robotics and industrial manipulators;
• Service systems;
• Self-organizing systems;
• Supply chain management;
• Logistics management;
• Virtual reality and augmented reality;
• Work study and ergonomics,

We sincerely hope that contributed articles and our effort in compiling them will enrich the global scientific knowledge base and inspire researchers for further state-of-the-art research work.

Dr. Robert Ojstersek
Dr. Péter Tamás
Dr. Hankun Zhang
Dr. Mihalache Ghinea
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Symmetry is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• decision-making techniques
• multicriteria optimization
• evolutionary computation
• sustainability
• sustainable manufacturing
• Industry 4.0
• complex system modelling and simulation
• visual computing
• collaborative workplace