Bianca Rimini

An innovative container for WEEE collection and transport: details and effects following the adoption.

The content of hazardous components in Waste arising from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) is a major concern that urges governments and industry to take measures to ensure proper treatment and disposal. Thus, the European Union issued directives to encourage reuse, recycling and other proper forms of recovery of such waste while companies and academics are still studying methods and technologies for optimizing recovery processes. This paper presents an analysis of the logistics process assuring the correct collection, handling, transportation and storing of WEEE. The experience comes from an Italian WEEE treatment plant (TRED Carpi S.r.l.) where a new kind of container has been introduced in order to improve the logistics system. An evaluation framework is described and used in order to compare different system configurations and assess the advantages emerging from adopting proper equipments for WEEE transport and handling.

Waste treatment: an environmental, economic and social analysis with a new group fuzzy PROMETHEE approach

Most complex decisions involve several stakeholders and therefore need to be solved using a group multi-criteria decision method. However, stakeholders or decision-makers often have divergent views, especially in the environmental sector. In order to integrate this divergence, a new group fuzzy PROMETHEE approach is introduced to combine the traditional environmental criteria of life cycle assessments with social and economic criteria. The modelling of uncertainty within the group of decision-makers using a fuzzy approach makes this method unique. The proposed fuzzy approach differs significantly from the standard one. The decision-makers express their judgments in crisp forms. In order to take into account the intrinsic dispersion of judgments within the group, a posteriori fuzzification procedure is applied. The crisp values are not simply aggregated; they are converted into a triangular fuzzy number based on the given evaluations. As a consequence, the definition of fuzzy membership functions, as required in standard fuzzy logic, is not required, which simplifies the process and makes it more reliable. The new approach is illustrated with a real case study concerning the selection of the best waste treatment solution in a natural park from among a traditional incinerator and an innovative integrated plant.

Municipal solid waste management: identification and analysis of engineering indexes representing demand and costs generated in virtuous Italian communities.

The definition and utilisation of engineering indexes in the field of Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM) is an issue of interest for technicians and scientists, which is widely discussed in literature. Specifically, the availability of consolidated engineering indexes is useful when new waste collection services are designed, along with when their performance is evaluated after a warm-up period. However, most published works in the field of MSWM complete their study with an analysis of isolated case studies. Conversely, decision makers require tools for information collection and exchange in order to trace the trends of these engineering indexes in large experiments. In this paper, common engineering indexes are presented and their values analysed in virtuous Italian communities, with the aim of contributing to the creation of a useful database whose data could be used during experiments, by indicating examples of MSWM demand profiles and the costs required to manage them.

An innovative model for WEEE recovery network management in accordance with the EU directives

An increased interest towards environmental respect amongst consumers, managers and researchers is registered, owing both to changing sensitivity and guidelines described in technical regulations. In this scenario, the European Union (EU) directives 2002/96/EC and 2003/108/EC, controlling the management of Wastes of Electric and Electronic Equipments (WEEE) are well-inserted. Companies producing Electric and Electronic Equipments (EEE) become responsible for end of life steps of their products. Hence, great efforts are made to optimise both recovery networks and remanufacturing and recycling processes. This paper proposes an innovative model for recovery network management. Included is a case study.

A revised FMEA with application to a blow moulding process

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a modified failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) in order to make the assignment of the scores for the occurrence factor more robust, and to link the FMEA chart directly to the maintenance activities. Design/methodology/approach – A well-known clustering algorithm (i.e. K-means), along with a normalisation approach, are applied and compared for the assignment of the occurrence scores. Subsequently, the relationship between failures and maintenance operations is made explicit by a correlation matrix. Finally, the K-means algorithm is applied to the maintenance operations again in order to sort them into priority classes. Findings – It is found that this revised FMEA approach improves the standard one due to its more rigorous mathematical formulation and lean applicability in real operating environments. Research limitations/implications – The novel approach may be improved by a deeper statistical analysis and/or applying the fuzzy theory. Practical impli...

A simulative approach for evaluating alternative feeding scenarios in a kanban system

In accordance with the lean production philosophy, an assembly line may be supplied by means of a kanban system, which regulates and simplifies the flow of materials between the lines and the warehouses. This paper focuses on evaluation of feeding policies that differ from each other in term of the number of kanbans managed per feeding tour. A pure cost-based approach is thus proposed, which considers both inline inventories along with handling costs proportionate to the number of operators involved in the parts-feeding process. A multi-scenario simulative approach is applied in order to establish the number of operators required to avoid inline shortages. The scenario minimising total cost is then selected. The innovation introduced is a model for describing kanban arrivals and their requests for feeding, improving the potential of the simulation to describe real-life environments. Lastly, a case study from the automotive industry is presented in order to highlight the applicability of the proposed approach as well and the effects of alternative feeding policies on the total cost incurred.

An innovative approach for job pre-allocation to parallel unrelated machines in the case of a batch sequence dependent manufacturing environment

The problem of allocating jobs to a set of parallel unrelated machines in a make to stock manufacturing system is studied. The items are subdivided into families of similar products. Sequence-dependent setups arise when products belonging both to the same family and to different families are sequenced. Restrictions on the number of available setups should be considered. The availability of planning batch production exists. Nevertheless, batch size is not known a priori. Hence, a solving approach considering both a pre-assignment procedure and a scheduling algorithm is proposed. Specifically, the focus of the article is on the pre-assignment methodology: a pre-assignment model (solved by a commercial solver) and two heuristics are presented and compared, in order to minimise the average idle residual capacity during the planning horizon, while considering pejorative factors related with the split volumes of the same product on different machines, unsatisfied demand along with demand produced in advance in each time period. The application to a case study is finally described in order to assess the performance of the proposed approach.

An automated picking workstation for healthcare applications

The costs associated with the management of healthcare systems have been subject to continuous scrutiny for some time now, with a view to reducing them without affecting the quality as perceived by final users. A number of different solutions have arisen based on centralisation of healthcare services and investments in Information Technology (IT). One such example is centralised management of pharmaceuticals among a group of hospitals which is then incorporated into the different steps of the automation supply chain. This paper focuses on a new picking workstation available for insertion in automated pharmaceutical distribution centres and which is capable of replacing manual workstations and bringing about improvements in working time. The workstation described uses a sophisticated computer vision algorithm to allow picking of very diverse and complex objects randomly available on a belt or in bins. The algorithm exploits state-of-the-art feature descriptors for an approach that is robust against occlusions and distracting objects, and invariant to scale, rotation or illumination changes. Finally, the performance of the designed picking workstation is tested in a large experimentation focused on the management of pharmaceutical items.

Low cost automation and poka yoke devices: tools for optimising production processes

Low cost automation and poka yoke philosophy assure good results when applied to manufacturing processes with a high incidence of human operators, with a low availability of time for solution implementation and with expensive effects associated with errors in executing operative procedures. Hence, their joint adoption is addressed in order to access the benefits they both guarantee. Specifically, in this paper, the case of a manufacturing line for heat exchangers is studied. Operative tools are redesigned in accordance with both low cost automation and poka yoke philosophy principles. Furthermore, since poka yoke solutions are subdivided between those preventing errors and those detecting them, the former are preferred. It emerges that LCA and poka yoke solutions adopted induce consistent improvements in the line productivity.

An innovative approach for optimizing warehouse capacity utilization

The optimal utilization of storage capacity is a key issue for companies with undersized warehouses, especially in situations where storage areas are expensive (i.e. warehouses with refrigeration systems). Since package size influences storage area design, in this paper an approach for jointly configuring secondary packages, pallets and storage racks is introduced. In particular, the multi-item model version of the problem is studied. Three alternative storage policies are explored: random, class-based, and dedicated locations. Finally, a case study highlights the relevance of the proposed methodology to real-life situations.