177,636 research outputs found
Integrated Models and Tools for Design and Management of Global Supply Chain
No full textIn modern and global supply chain, the increasing trend toward product variety, level of service, short delivery delay and response time to consumers, highlight the importance to set and configure smooth and efficient logistic processes and operations.
In order to comply such purposes the supply chain management (SCM) theory entails a wide set of models, algorithms, procedure, tools and best practices for the design, the management and control of articulated supply chain networks and logistics nodes.
The purpose of this Ph.D. dissertation is going in detail on the principle aspects and concerns of supply chain network and warehousing systems, by proposing and illustrating useful methods, procedures and support-decision tools for the design and management of real instance applications, such those currently face by enterprises.
In particular, after a comprehensive literature review of the principal warehousing issues and entities, the manuscript focuses on design top-down procedure for both less-than-unit-load OPS and unit-load storage systems. For both, decision-support software platforms are illustrated as useful tools to address the optimization of the warehousing performances and efficiency metrics. The development of such interfaces enables to test the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical top-down procedure with huge real case studies, taken by industry applications.
Whether the large part of the manuscript deals with micro concerns of warehousing nodes, also macro issues and aspects related to the planning, design, and management of the whole supply chain are enquired and discussed.
The integration of macro criticalities, such as the design of the supply chain infrastructure and the placement of the logistic nodes, with micro concerns, such the design of warehousing nodes and the management of material handling, is addressed through the definition of integrated models and procedures, involving the overall supply chain and the whole product life cycle.
A new integrated perspective should be applied in study and planning of global supply chains. Each aspect of the reality influences the others. Each product consumed by a customer tells a story, made by activities, transformations, handling, processes, traveling around the world. Each step of this story accounts costs, time, resources exploitation, labor, waste, pollution. The economical and environmental sustainability of the modern global supply chain is the challenge to face
Sergio Lenci. Progettare progettando
No full textL'articolo ripercorre i cinquant'anni di professione dell'architetto Sergio Lenci, partendo dalle carte dell'Archivio, conservato presso l'Ordine degli Architetti P.P.C. di Roma e Provincia, catalogato e inventariato dagli stessi autori (Maria Letizia Accorsi e Roberto Faraone) con la direzione scientifica della dott.ssa Elisabetta Reale (Soprintendenza Archivistica per il Lazio)
A support-design procedure for sustainable food product-packaging systems
No full textThis chapter discusses the drivers and characteristics of the product-package system in food supply chains and focuses on the role that the logistic performance of the package plays in the sustainability of the supply chain operations. The product-package system is first introduced through the definition of a hierarchical structure built upon the product. Then, a set of design parameters are introduced, each of them addressing a specific product-package function/performance according to a multidisciplinary approach. An in-depth discussion is provided about the logistic performance of food packaging, and some support-design quantitative models and KPIs are introduced to the scope.
Lastly, built upon the aforementioned entities and parameters, a hierarchical closed-loop support-design procedure for economic and environmental sustainable food product-packaging systems is formalized, illustrated, and discussed
A Hierarchical Framework for Spares-Driven Maintenance Tasks' Reviewing, Planning and Scheduling
No full textThis paper explores the impacts of reviewing the time to replace of spare parts under the lenses of reliability- and cost-based optimization with the attempt to reduce the cost of a maintenance plan within a harshly constrained maintenance tasks' scheduling problem. A hierarchical procedure for a robust reliability prediction and scheduling of maintenance tasks is introduced to this purpose. This study takes inspiration from real applications of the preventive maintenance (PM) scheduling process on high-throughput packing and manufacturing lines counting hundreds of functional groups and thousands of components subject to failures and replacements. We investigate the role and the criticality of data entry in the not polynomial (NP)-hard cost-based and reliability-based scheduling problem proposed by Manzini et al. (R. Manzini, R. Accorsi, T. Cennerazzo, E. Ferrari and F. Maranesi, The scheduling of maintenance. A resource-constraints mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model, Comput. Ind. Eng. 87 (2015) 561-568). The proposed reliability-based analysis aids the setting of proper time to failures for spare parts and combines with an analytical single-component and cost-based model to set which maintenance tasks are the most sensitive to the overall cost reduction of a maintenance plan
Sustainable urban food planning: Optimizing land-use allocation and transportation in urban-rural ecosystems
No full textOver recent years, faster urbanization and natural resources depletion have compelled an increasing attention to environmental conservation and the careful management of soil and land use. Sustainable Land-Use Planning (LUP) is the activity of allocating resources and uses to specific sites and areas, with different purposes that depend on the decision maker. Examples of these include maximizing crop yields or the profits of landowners and minimizing environmental impacts such as water consumption or greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions. Several environmental drivers and stressors can be considered in LUP, but one of the goals of environmental conservation is undoubtedly the reduction of carbon emissions. Considering the rapid growth of cities, which centralize resources, population, and consumers and thereby contribute to climate change, sustainable LUP planning of integrated urban and rural ecosystem can be the key to addressing such environmental and social issues.
This chapter builds on the well-known LUP problem by investigating the relationship between transportation of people, i.e., mobility, and of food resources within a closed urban-rural ecosystem, and by determining how this affects the overall carbon emissions. The proposed LUP approach is based on a model that integrates agricultural properties such as soil features and crop yields, with the renewable energy potential of the area and the urban needs of accessibility and density. The discussed mix integer linear programming (MILP) model is implemented into a planning-support tool aimed at studying the optimal allocation of land uses in an urban-rural ecosystem with the goal of minimizing the carbon emissions. The model takes into account a closed ecosystem where agriculture, energy production, and residential areas satisfy different internal demands and needs. Some results obtained by the application of this tool are illustrated and discussed, showing the potential of the proposed approach in supporting the planning of low-carbon urban-rural ecosystems
Mathematical modeling of food and agriculture distribution
No full textThe food industry has grown from a local industry into a global industry with the birth of technology. Products are delivered via trucking, water, rail, air, or some combination. The distribution of products in a supply chain is a difficult problem to solve, and perishable products bring additional complexity. While technology exists to slow down the deterioration rate of foods, products need to be delivered urgently to fulfill customer demands satisfactorily, with the expected quality. Most of the literature focuses on minimizing the time these products spend in the supply chain, as well as considering the measurement of perishability in various ways. This chapter covers the mathematical models that have been developed in the areas of routing, network design, and distribution with respect to the food distribution network
Designing advanced food packaging systems and technologies through modeling and virtualization
No full textFinding an appropriate food package solution is a challenging task today, due to the necessity of integrating an increasing number of cross-linked and sometimes contradictory requirements related to the specific multiple purposes that a packaging system is supposed to provide. The complexity and variety of food products, stricter food quality requirements, rapidly changing consumer demand paradigms, increasing demands for sustainability, and the fast adaptations of multimodal food distribution networks to the modern way of living of our liquid society make food packaging development a difficult task in today’s world. This chapter provides a taxonomy of existing research, design, and engineering approaches and technologies for food packaging and provides some examples of their application in practice. Such techniques provide wide support to designers and even food supply chain planners committed to proposing cost-effective, ergonomic logistics and environmentally friendly food packages
Modeling inclusive food supply chains toward sustainable ecosystem planning
No full textThe increasing global food demand is forcing the food industry to identify new effective strategies for production and distribution, as was already experienced in the 1960s and 1970s with the birth of green chemistry and the explosion of fossil-fueled agriculture.
The globalization of the food trade has bridged the barriers between production and consumption without respecting the balance of natural resources, resulting in enlarged gaps between developed and developing countries. In the food sector many issues affect the three dimensions of sustainability: economic, environmental, and social. These include land-use change and deforestation to widen farms, pastures, and biofuel cultivations, land grabbing to establish intensive agriculture, clean water consumption, soil and air pollution, lack of supply chain infrastructures, volatile prices, and climate change. Together these issues make current food supply chains (FSCs) unsustainable over the long term and challenge the future of the food industries and society as well. Such issues also reveal the lack of connections and coordination among actors involved in FSCs and open debate about the neglected role of the physical and logistic/distribution infrastructures in addressing long-term sustainability targets.
This chapter illustrates a hierarchical framework aimed at modeling production and distribution food ecosystems through a set of interdisciplinary parameters and decision variables. The decision levers identified in this framework describe how the food ecosystem behaves according to an input-output flow analysis. The framework formulates a set of planning decision problems via mixed linear programming. The definition of the inclusive food ecosystem inspires collecting multidisciplinary parameters that impose collaboration between decision-makers. Furthermore, as part of the ecosystem, logistics and distribution processes are involved in the planning issues beyond the common perception that sees an FSC as a sequence of independent stages
Modeling by-products and waste management in the meat industry
No full textAs currently designed, food supply chains (FSCs) still provide room for developing new business around the production, distribution, and delivery of primary food. Specifically, beyond primary production some FSCs provide an opportunity to design, plan, and optimize new chains based on the valorization of by-products and waste. A concrete example of such opportunities lies in the exploitation and distribution of by-products from the meat industry.
Traditionally, different high-value meat cuts are distributed to retailers and consumers, but less attention is paid to by-products resulting from the slaughtering processes that generate waste and cost instead of being valorized as raw materials for other transformation industries. In order to exploit such business and to reduce the amount of waste associated with the meat industry, new paths can be followed according to the circular economy paradigm. Particularly, new storage, distribution, collection, that is, logistics operations and processes, must be designed and optimized.
This chapter provides a high-level analytic model to design optimal networks between the primary meat chain and other supply chains using by-products. Some potential valorization chains are identified and tested through a sensitivity analysis, which highlights the impact of the logistic distance between chains in the pursuit of a circular economy model
Design-support methodologies for job-shop production system in the food industry
No full textTo meet the increasing demand for functional food and changing consumer habits, the food processing industry is shifting from flow manufacturing to batch manufacturing. As a consequence, job-shop (JS) systems are progressively developing to replace traditional food-processing systems. Such systems are characterized by high complexity in their design and management due to the high number of entities involved (i.e., products, components and parts, resources or workshops, operators, handling tools), the technological and operational constraints (i.e., working cycle, shop throughput, set-up tasks), and the layout issues (i.e., flow lines, congestions, bottlenecks). This chapter explores the impact of logistics and handling tasks in the design of food JS processing facilities. The aims of the JS designer are the minimization of the infrastructural costs, the optimization of the products and labor flows, and the enhancement of the safety of food products, affecting concurrently the layouts, operations, and related performances.
The chapter illustrates a set of methodologies and quantitative indicators that aid the design of a JS system involving logistic efficiency, infrastructure cost minimization, and food safety targets. We assess the layout of the manufacturing system through a multidisciplinary dashboard of key performance indicators (KPIs) (1) and a design methodology addressing the resource dimensioning problem (2). A numerical example gathered from an Italian catering company showcases the application of the proposed tools and elicits debate on the best practice for facility design in the food service (catering) industry
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