1,720,959 research outputs found
Analysing reusable and disposable containers costs in food catering supply chain networks using optimization
Full text linkNowadays, strategies to minimize environmental impacts throughout food supply chains (FSC) are hotspots for academics and practitioners. A relevant portion of such impact results from food primary and secondary packaging. Food Catering Supply Chain (FCSC), made of multi-stage logistic networks, represents a challenging scenario for minimizing packaging disposal. Indeed, the booming widespread of reusable plastic containers (RPCs) in the FSC suggests the adoption of such containers to foster reuse and prevent material waste with respect to disposables. This paper explores the application of RPCs in the context of FCSC by proposing a MILP model that aids supplier and package choices considering the reusable package-pooler and the catering system networks. This model minimizes operational and logistic costs whilst optimizing the packaged product’s flows. A case study provides the model’s validation and offers insights for future research investigations. Results show that increasing the numbers of supply chain actors and the size of the logistic network make the adoption of RPCs economically convenient
Redesign resilient production and distribution networks in the food catering industry
Full text linkThe catering industry is responsible for producing and distributing meals in schools, hospitals, and companies' cafeterias. Dietary pattern changes and smart working caused by the Covid pandemic highly affect the food catering industry. The demand contraction put in crisis the typical distributed productive structure of such a sector. A 30% revenue reduction from 2019 to 2020 called for the widespread network of production plants to cut corners. Production centralization leads to economies of scale but increases the logistics costs of distribution. We present a real case study of production network downsizing in the catering industry, focusing on optimizing logistics and fixed capacity costs. Meals distribution has tight time constraints due to the consumers-imposed time windows and the microbiological safety rules-imposed time windows. The proposed methodology integrates the vehicle routing problem developed by the company into a network costs optimizations problem. This optimization model exploits the pre-optimized routes defined by the company, chooses which plants to open, and performs the customer-route pairing for each picked production site. Different allocation scenarios of the same demand distribution are defined and analyzed in the case study, allowing a quantitative comparison between different redesign strategies. Results show how the mileage varies among the centralized scenarios, with a cost differential from +61% to + 29% compared to the distributed scenario. The comparison of pre and post covid demand scenarios shows how the model cushions the logistics costs: the optimal choices of the routes allows a 22% traveling reduction in the 38% post-pandemic demand reduction of the same service area. The model supports the decision-making process in the network redesign of the food catering industry by analyzing how alternative location-allocation scenarios deal with different demand patterns
Exploring strategies, technologies, and novel paradigms for sustainable agri-food supply chain ecosystems design and control
No full textSustainable Development and Pathways for Food Ecosystems: Integration and Synergies is a science-based reference which explores the roles played by agri-food ecosystems, their functions and needs, and the importance of the interdependencies among them. This book explores the relationships between food ecosystems, highlighting each entity’s role in transforming, preserving, and conserving the others. It is a vital resource of information on the ecosystems that surround the food supply chain and includes all processes, from primary production of food through consumption. The book covers the agricultural and farming phases; processing and transformation; storage and consolidation; packaging; transportation; the management of waste and losses; and the supply and conservation of enabling resources like materials, biodiversity, energy, and water. Sustainable Development and Pathways for Food Ecosystems: Integration and Synergies is a useful reference for academics, researchers, policymakers, and industry professionals involved within the agri-food sector management
Simulating product-packaging conditions under environmental stresses in a food supply chain cyber-physical twin
Full text linkFood supply chains (FSCs) enable safe, effective, and sustainable food distribution, linking farm to table. They involve multiple sources and destinations, a broad set of actors and handling modes, variable and unpredictable environmental conditions, potentially decaying food and packaging, affecting quality and consumer satisfaction. New methodologies, approaches, and ready-to-practice solutions to improve the FSC capacity to maintain the food quality and the packaging properties at the final consumer are expected and missing. To address such aspects simultaneously, this paper proposes a novel framework, using simulation, to study food product and packaging conditions under environmental stresses throughout the FSC. The framework includes five layers of study, i.e., the environmental layer, the FSC layer, the visibility layer, the simulation layer, and the functional layer, linking the field, i.e. the operative physical environment, to a simulation environment, based on a fully equipped and closed-loop controlled physical twin made of a climate-controlled chamber. The cyber-physical twin description is improved by reviewing a collection of case studies we used over the years to validate the framework and explore the functionalities of the physical twin. Case studies deal with different food products and packaging alternatives, demonstrating the flexibility of the proposed framework and physical twin to support the analysis and decision-making in FSC improvement
Augmented spatial LCA for comparing reusable and recyclable food packaging containers networks
Full text linkDespite the benefits of reducing virgin plastic polymers in food packaging, the spread of reusable systems is limited by organizational and economic constraints, and reasonable doubts about their real environmental impacts still persist. Several studies have evaluated the environmental sustainability of reusable plastic containers (RPCs) compared to single-use systems; however, the trade-offs and benefits of reuse are not always clear. To model real-world network complexity with its bottlenecks and unbalanced infrastructural networks, primary data on traveled distances and flows collected throughout the logistics network must be included in the analysis. The material-driven characterization of the secondary package's logistic networks justifies the integration of Geographic Information Systems into LCA to overcome the limitations of using only secondary data, which is commonly done. This study evaluated alternative secondary packaging systems (SPSs) and associated material-driven networks using a spatial Life Cycle Assesment (LCA) approach augmented with a supply chain digital twin. The material-driven network flows were virtualized, and the resulting data on transportation emissions and fuel consumption represent the LCA input. The networks serve a countrywide Food Supply Chain (FSC) from growers to retailers, with up to 1600 nodes located in Italy over a 10-year time span. In this study, the Life Cycle Environmental Impact (LCEI) of nine alternative SPSs differing in size and material-driven network, that is, reusable polypropylene (PP) crates, single-use corrugated cardboard boxes (CCBs), and single-use PP crates, were investigated. The novel contributions of the study lie in the method, scale of analysis, and accuracy of spatial data collection. The results show that the higher transportation emissions of RPCs (+23.80% compared with that of CCBs) are balanced by the reduced production and disposal impacts per use. After 10 years, the environmental impacts of the single-use SPSs are higher than those of the RPC SPSs in all the impact categories evaluated. Considering GWP20, the RPCs are environmentally friendly after only 15 rotations. This study demonstrates the sensitivity of LCA results to transport parameters and highlights the importance of adopting supply chain digital twins to enhance the accuracy of the environmental profile of such complex logistic ecosystems
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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