3,332 research outputs found
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
Recipe-driven methods for the design and management of food catering production systems
No full textThe food catering industry provides ready-to-eat meals to consumers who eat away from their homes at many heterogeneous points of demand, for example, schools, hospitals, and company canteens. Given the number of consumers served, many diets, tastes, and expectations must be satisfied, and this fact enlarges the variability and complexity of the menus, made from many hundreds of recipes.
Such complexity also affects the production process and results in a specific organization of the production system and the associated logistic activities. First, the whole production needs to be organized in agreement with the sequence of processing tasks of the recipes, in a typical job-shop system. Second, the details regarding the raw ingredients, work in progress (WIP), and finished products of each recipe can be used to set the hierarchy of processing tasks and to support production scheduling accordingly. However, the lack of knowledge and data relating to the task sequence beyond the recipes limits the implementation of adequate food catering production processes and control systems.
This chapter deals with the organization of production activities in a food catering facility and introduces a methodology for the design of accurate task sequences for each recipe starting from the bill-of-materials of the recipe’s ingredients. The deliverable of the proposed method is the hierarchy of the processing/handling/packing task necessary for each recipe, which could be quickly implemented in a spreadsheet or management software for the scheduling of the production activities. Specifically, an algorithm is defined to provide a graph of the task priority according to precedence constraints, and a data architecture illustrated to store the resulting working cycle.
Finally, this chapter discusses the potential application of such methods in the food catering industry in agreement with the expected growth of food service demand and the standardization of production
Performance Assessment in Order Picking Systems: A Visual Double Cross-Analysis
No full textThe aim of this paper is to introduce a practice-ready systematic methodology for the management of storage assignments and allocation decisions as well as an assessment of the resulting performance in an order picking system (OPS). Built on extant and well-known metrics of performance this method implements a double cross-analysis through an original visual tool that is easy to understand by warehousing managers and practitioners. This tool is organized in two main steps. The first step is a cross-analysis that combines multiple performance indicators to help the decision maker understand whether an OPS provides the scope for performance improvement. A comparison with potential storage configurations is then conducted in the second step through a tailored multi-scenario cross-analysis, which attempts to identify the best combination of allocation and assignment policies capable of minimizing the overall travelling performance. The proposed methodology is applied to a significant real-world OPS. The selected case study represents a reference framework for decision makers and practitioners
A imagem de Alessandro Baricco no Brasil
No full textDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos da Tradução, Florianópolis, 2013.Com a intenção de delinear o modo pelo qual o escritor italiano Alessandro Baricco se inseriu no sistema literário brasileiro e os caminhos percorridos pelos seus livros traduzidos, esta dissertação dá voz às experiências tradutórias de seus tradutores. A inserção de Bariccono Brasil tem seu início em 1997, através de uma proposição da Profa. Dra. Roberta Barni à editora Iluminuras da tradução de Oceano Mare. A partir daí, outras sete obras foram publicadas no Brasil, sendo três delas traduzidas por Roberta Barni e as outras quatro por quatro tradutores diferentes. De um lado, considera-se o tradutor como figura principal namediação entre culturas, e, de outro, se analisa a realidade desta figuradentro do sistema literário, sua invisibilidade, seus limites e o exercíciode sua profissão. A pesquisa conta, ainda, com críticas e resenhas referentes ao autor italiano publicadas em jornais consagrados no Brasil, considerando estas como parte constituinte da imagem de Baricco refletida em território nacional. Abstract : Intending to delineate the way the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco has been inserted in the Brazilian literary system and the paths his translated books have followed, this thesis gives voice to the translating experiences of his translators. Baricco's insertion in Brazil began in 1997, through a personal project of Dr. Roberta Barni, with her translation of Oceano Mare. Since then, seven other of his works have been published in Brazil, three of which were translated by Roberta Barni and the other four by four different translators. On the one hand,the translator is considered as the main figure in mediation betweencultures and, on the other, this figure's reality is analyzed within theliterary system: its invisibility, its limits and its professional practice. Criticisms and reviews of this Italian author published in well established Brazilian newspapers are also considered, with the understanding that they are part of Baricco's image reflected here
La maturità di Alessandro Fei del Barbiere, in bilico tra Maniera e Riforma
No full textThis article studies the mature career of the Florentine painter Alessandro Fei del Barbiere (1537-1592), beginning with the rediscovery of the 'Ascension' altarpiece formerly in the Albizi Chapel in the destroyed church of San Pier Maggiore, Florence. Studying this painting and others recorded in 1584 by the biographer Raffaello Borghini, such as the two altarpieces for Santa Maria delle Grazie and the Madonna dell'Umiltà in Pistoia, the author reconstructs a body of works showing how in the 1580s Fei gradually went beyond the archaic style of his apprenticeship - he had been trained by Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio and Pierfrancesco Foschi, but was also marked by the Maniera of Vasari - evolving towards naturalism in both mimesis and pictorial handling. In Florence, his development partly parallels that of Santi di Tito and his circle, but Fei was also influenced by a probable sojourn during the early part of that decade in Rome, where he could have been inspired by Girolamo Muziano and the painters working for Pope Gregory XIII. Among other proposals, the author suggests that the artist was responsible for decorating the chancel of Fiesole Cathedral (c. 1584-1589), which consisted of an altarpiece, only rarely discussed by scholars, and a cycle of frescoes hitherto attributed to Nicodemo Ferrucci
La gestione efficiente del materiale ospedaliero: il Just-In-Time ed il Kanban
No full textIl Settore Ospedaliero è stato ed è tuttora in continua trasformazione dal punto di vista della gestione delle risorse ad esso dedicate. L’evoluzione della politica italiana in tema di Sanità ha subito un grosso impulso con il D.Lgs. 502 del dicembre ’92 che ha portato alla cosiddetta aziendalizzazione degli Ospedali pubblici costringendo i gruppi dirigenti delle Aziende Ospedaliere a prestare maggiore attenzione alle modalità d’impiego delle proprie risorse. Gli investimenti in materiali di consumo e la loro gestione pesano notevolmente sul bilancio aziendale e da questa osservazione è nata l’esigenza di implementare nuovi sistemi di gestione delle scorte.
In tale contesto si inserisce la sperimentazione che questo lavoro vuole presentare: la ricerca che viene proposta riguarda la progettazione e la sperimentazione di un innovativo modello di riapprovvigionamento automatico di prodotti nei reparti ospedalieri basato sulla logica Just in Time. La prototipazione è stata sviluppata in alcuni reparti dell’Azienda Ospedaliera di Padova rappresentativi per le varie categorie e significativi per tipo di attività e mole di consumi. I risultati ottenuti sono eccellenti, in quanto, a fronte di modesti investimenti limitati all'introduzione di un sistema di armadi modulari e di carrelli "intelligenti", sono diminuiti sensibilmente la varietà ed i volumi di prodotti mantenuti in reparto, le quantità di farmaci scaduti, gli errori nelle ordinazioni ed i prelievi ingiustificati. Infine, si assiste da parte del personale ospedaliero, ad un importante alleggerimento delle attività amministrative di reparto, a favore dell’attività di assistenza ai pazienti
On the design of cooperative vendors’ networks in retail food supply chains: a logistics-driven approach
No full textThis paper explores the impact of the adoption of a cooperative approach on retail food supply chains, whose performances are strongly affected by the daily planning of deliveries from vendors. This approach requires a horizontal communication among vendors, and might result in minimising the overall transport costs. Nevertheless, the proper trade-off between costs and return is hard to be foreseen. Building on existing studies, this paper investigates the benefits and the opportunities deriving from the vendors' collaboration on the delivery process. We provide a decision support tool using an integer linear programming model to explore in a what-if multi-scenario analysis the trade-off between competitive and cooperative delivery regimes. The distribution of order release and fleet availability couple with the geography of the network, allowing for the identification of thresholds of mutual convenience in shifting from a competitive to a cooperative regime. Our methodology, applied to a case study from a regional retailer supply chain, highlights evident benefits, which are sometimes up to 40% of the overall costs, for the retailer, the carriers, and the vendors. Furthermore, accounting for those costs, the tool identifies, for a given supply chain, who actually gains from the collaboration and what those gains are
Multi-location model for the estimation of solar radiation components in Europe
No full textHourly and daily solar radiation data are crucial for the design of energy systems based on the solar source. Global irradiance, measured on the horizontal plane, is, generally, available from weather station databases. The direct and diffuse fractions are measured rarely and should be analytically calculated for many geographical locations. Aim of this paper is to present a multi-location model to estimate the expected profiles of solar radiation components. It focuses on the European (EU) geographical area joining data from 44 weather stations located in 11 countries. Data are collected by the World Radiation Data Centre (WRDC) between 2004 and 2007. Different analytic functions, correlating the diffuse fraction to the clearness index, are calculated and compared to outline the analytic expressions of the best fitting curves. The effect of seasonality on solar irradiance is considered developing summer and winter scenarios together with annual models. The most adopted statistical indices are used as key performance factors. Finally, data from three locations not included in the dataset considered for model development allows to test the proposed approach against an independent dataset. Obtained results show the effectiveness of adopting a multi-location models to estimate solar radiation components instead of several single location models. This is due to the increase of the model geographical range of applicability without a significant decrease of the accuracy. The percentage gap between single and multi-location model performances is lower than 20% for most of the statistical indices adopted for both the model development and ex-post validation through the three location independent dataset
Retrofitting of R404a Commercial Refrigeration Systems with R410a and R407f HFCs Refrigerants
No full textThis chapter presents an experimental analysis about the retrofitting of two commercial stationary refrigeration systems marketed by an Italian leading company of the sector. Such systems operate both at medium temperature (MT) and low temperature (LT) and they are originally designed to work with the high global warming potential (GWP) hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) R404a fluid (GWP = 3922). The purpose is to investigate the performances of HFCs R410a (GWP = 2088) and R407f (GWP = 1825) chosen as effective alternatives to HFC R404a, due to their compatibility, non-flammability and market availability. Furthermore, such fluids meet the EU restrictions in force in the next future for high GWP HFCs. The experimental analysis compares the performances, in terms of COP and cooling capacity, of R404a and the two identified alternatives under different operating conditions, i.e. chamber and condenser inlet air temperatures. In case of comparable performances, significant environmental benefits are introduced by the adoption of R407f and R410a in the MT and LT refrigeration systems
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