CIRP Fellow, IFAC, IFIP, SME,  ASME, University of Patras, Greece

Dimitris Mourtzis is Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics at the University of Patras, Greece. He is Vice President of Research and Development Council of the University of Patras and Governing Board Member of the University of Patras at the CLEAN AVIATION Joint Undertaking, representing European Academia. He is also Director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems and Automation (LMS). Additionally, he has been the Vice President of the Technical Council of the University of Patras. He is Coordinator of the Internal Evaluation Team for the evaluation of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics of the University of Patras and Scientific Officer for the Protection of Personal (GDPR) Data and for the Provision of Quality Management System Certification Services of ISO 9001:2015 Standard in the University of Patras. In addition, he is the Coordinator of the Committee on New Technologies and New Materials of the Technical Chamber of Greece.

He was Vice Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics of the University of Patras from 2017 to 2020 and the Director of the Design and Manufacturing Division from 2015 to 2017. He has remarkable teaching experience as he has taught for many years eight undergraduate and four graduate courses at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics of University of Patras.

His scientific interests focus on the advanced simulation, design, planning and control of manufacturing systems and networks, robotic systems, automation, augmented, mixed, and virtual reality in manufacturing, manufacturing processes modelling, Blockchain, Industry 4.0, Industry 5.0 and Society 5.0. Furthermore, his research interests are also focused on the design, development and implementation of solutions based on the utilization of technologies, such as cloud technologies, Internet of Things (IoT), the Digital Twin, 5G cellular networks, artificial intelligence, as well as on the development of Product-Service Systems (PSS). He is also actively involved in the digital transformation of manufacturing companies and implementation of Industry 4.0 as well as of the upcoming Industry 5.0 and Society 5.0 practices, both at a national and international level.

He is Fellow of the International Academy for Production Research (CIRP), Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC 5.2), Fellow of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP WG 5.7), Member of the Scientific Committee of the International Association of Learning Factories (IALF), Member of the European Factories of the Future Association (EFFRA), Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), Member of the European Manufacturing and Innovation Research Association (EMIRACLE), and Founding Member of the European Aeronautics Science Network/Association (EASN).

He is also author and editor of the book Design and Operation of Production Networks for Mass Personalization in the Era of Cloud Technology published by Elsevier. He is also an editorial board member of at eight international scientific journals and has participated as a guest editor at four international scientific journals with high impact factor. More specifically, he is an editorial board member for International Journal of Production Research – IJPR, International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing – IJCIM, Computers & Industrial Engineering, Associate Editor in Chief of Robotic and Automation of Applied Sciences, in Advances in Manufacturing, in Mathematical Problems in Engineering of Hindawi, in Frontiers in Manufacturing Technology, in Journal of Green Manufacturing Open and in Digital Twin Journal.

He has authored monographs, book chapters, papers, white papers, and research project reports, has published numerous articles in international scientific journals (peer-reviewed). He has published more than 310 scientific papers, of which 107 were at highly regarded international scientific journals, one 156 at international scientific conferences, 36 chapters in books, 10 editorials and 4 white papers. He has won the Burbidge Best Paper Award in APMS 2012, the Commended Paper Award in IFAC MIM 2022, the Best Paper Award in Mechanical Engineering Section in MDPI Applied Sciences (2020) and the Best Presentation Award at the Second Digital Twin Conference 2022.

The unique citations of his published work exceed 11,700 (h-index 56/i-10 index: 178) according to the databases Google Scholar, Scopus and Research Gate.

 China Institute of FTZ Supply Chain,  China

Professor Kannan Govndan is currently a Distinguished Professor with the China Institute of FTZ Supply Chain, Shanghai, China, the head of Intelligent Supply Chain Center and the Chair Professor and Head of Center for Sustainable Supply Chain Engineering with the Department of Technology and Innovation, University of Southern Denmark, Odense. He has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher in Engineering for five years in a row (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022) by Thomson-Reuters/Clarivate Analytics. He has published more than 400 international journal articles (with 45550+ citations and an h-index of 113) in leading journals such as Nature, European Journal of Operational Research, Omega, Decision Sciences, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Journal of Environmental Management, Journal of Cleaner Production, Computers & Industrial Engineering, Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, European Management Journal, International Journal of Production Economics and International Journal of Production Research. Many of his papers were selected as the ESI top 1% highly cited papers or 0.1% hot papers and highlighted as the key scientific articles contributing to the excellence in engineering and environmental research. He is an executive editor of the Journal of Cleaner Production, associate editor of Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, senior editor of Industrial Management and Data Systems, editor of Annals of Operations Research, an area editor of INFOR: Information Systems and Operational Research, and was a guest editor in journals such as Decision Sciences, European Journal of Operations Research, Computers and OR, Annals of OR, Journal of Cleaner Production, and International Journal of Production Economics. Finally, he is an editorial board member of several international journals. His research interests include digital supply chain, Industry 4.0 on supply chain, sustainable development goals, reverse logistics, closed-loop supply chain, digitalized sustainable circular economy, green supply chain management, and sustainable supply chain management.

University of Southern California, USA

Maged M. Dessouky is Dean's Professor and Chair in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Southern California. His research area is transportation system optimization where he has authored over 100  refereed publications.  His paper “Optimal Slack Time for Schedule Based Transit Operations” was awarded the INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Best Paper Prize.  He is a Fellow of IISE and serves as Associate Director of METRANS, a center focused on solving important urban transportation problems.  He is currently area/associate editor of Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, IISE Transactions, and Computers and Industrial Engineering, and previously served on the editorial board of Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, as area editor of the ACM Transactions of Modeling and Computer Simulation, and as associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He received his PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and MS and BS degrees from Purdue University.​

Beihang University, China

Professor Ying Fan received her PhD in System Engineering. She had been involved in the research of energy economics and management at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) for 25 years before moving to Beijing University in 2015. She is currently a professor and the Dean of the School of Economics and Management at Beihang University, and the director of MOE social science laboratory of low carbon intelligent governance (LLIG) at Beihang University. She was a visiting scholar at Cornell University in the US from 2004 to 2005, and visited KAPSARC in Saudi Arabia in 2015. She was the Vice President for Academic Affairs of the International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) from 2016 to 2020. She has carried out over 60 research projects, and has published over 300 papers in peer reviewed journals. Now she is leading an innovative research group of NSFC titled “Green Oriented Complex System Management and Decision Making.” Her research and teaching fields include energy economics, energy-environment-economy system modeling, emission trading scheme, climate change, energy and environmental policy.

FASME, FEngNZ, The University of Auckland, New Zealand

Xun W. Xu is a Professor of Smart Manufacturing at the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, The University of Auckland. He has been working in the field of intelligent manufacturing solutions for some 30 years. Dr. Xu is an internationally recognized expert in smart manufacturing systems, STEP-NC, cloud-based manufacturing and IoT-enabled manufacturing. He serves as an associate editor and member of the editorial board of a number of international journals and has published over 350 research papers. Dr. Xu is the Director of the Laboratory for Industry 4.0 Smart Manufacturing Systems (LISMS), the only laboratory for Industry 4.0 in New Zealand. His current research focus is on Industry 4.0 technologies, e.g., smart factories, digital twins and cloud manufacturing. Dr. Xu is a Fellow of the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and Engineering New Zealand (EngNZ). He was recognized by the Web of Science as a Clarivate™ Highly Cited Researcher in 2020. In the same year, he was named among of the “20 Most Influential Professors in Smart Manufacturing” by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME). Dr. Xu is now on the Board of Directors of the North American Manufacturing Research Institution of SME (NAMRI/SME) and NAMRI Scientific Committee Chair-Elect.

Dr. Al-Assaf had his PhD from Oxford University and leadership training from Cornell University. He is a widely published and academic and senior education management professional with extensive international experience.
He is currently President of Rochester Institute of Technology- Dubai, a leading not for profit international branch of RIT Rochester, New York. RIT Dubai University is established in conjunction with the Dubai Government in Dubai Silicon Oasis. Prior to this he was Dean of the College of Engineering at the American University of Sharjah where he was one of the founding members of the electrical engineering and computer engineering programs.
During his tenure at RIT Dubai, he has ensured that the university plays a major role in the ecosystem of Dubai Silicon Oasis and supporting the achievements of Dubai vision. Introduced a number of new programs, certifications and initiatives to meet the needs of public and technology partners including: Smart City Sciences, Data Analytics, Emerging Technologies, Corporate and Customer Happiness, Future Shaping, Computing Security and Sustainability among others.
Dr. Al-Assaf's research focuses on using soft computing to model and control various industrial, business and medical systems. Applications include materials modeling and classification, prostheses control, industrial quality control and optimization. His industrial experience is in the areas of adaptive and predictive control, soft computing and industrial instrumentation and control