Editorial to the Special Issue on: Agile Methods for sustainable Manufacturing

Sustainability is one of the key requirements for manufacturing industry to be competitive and long term. Despite the numerous attempts towards the creation of sustainable manufacturing systems, there is an urgent need for effective methods to implement sustainable processes in industry. Indeed, sustainable manufacturing pushes companies to consider three complex challenges at the same time: ecological challenge (reducing environmental impact and resource consumption), economical challenge (improving overall process efficiency and reducing global costs), and social challenge (increasing social effectiveness and reducing human-related impact). As a consequence, other than the more conventional firm performance objectives of cost, quality, speed, flexibility and dependability, today there are new requirements for firms to deliver on sustainable objectives.