Sustainable Operations

•We present terms and definitions to clarify what is to be understood by ”Sustainable Operations”.•Sustainable Operations is demarcated from its neighboring topics.•Sustainable Operations is structured into various areas.•For each area, we present examples of applications and refer to existing literature.•Future research perspectives are elaborated.

The field of “Sustainable Operations” and the term itself have arisen only in the last ten to twenty years in the context of sustainable development. Even though the term is frequently used in practice and research, it has hardly been characterized and defined precisely in the literature so far. For reasons of clarity and unambiguity, we present terms and definitions before we demarcate Sustainable Operations from its neighboring topics. We especially focus on the interactions between economic, social and ecological aspects as part of Sustainable Operations, but exclude the development of a normative ethics, instead focusing on the use of quantitative methods from Operations Research. Then the broad subject of Sustainable Operations is structured into various areas arising from the typical structure of an enterprise. For each area, we present examples of applications and refer to the existing literature. The paper concludes with future research directions.