Elpidio Romano

Supply chain performance sustainability through resilience function

Todays business world faces challenges and pressures on an unprecedented scale. Many of these obstacles have the potential to severely affect the continuity of a manufacturing enterprise, in particular, through disruption to the wider supply chain. Indeed, it can be argued that supply chain risk is currently greater now than ever before. Resilience is one of the ways to combat disruptions in the supply chain. In this paper the behavior of a Supply chain is studied using a SD model built with Powersim. The paper describes the process of building the model and utilizes the model to demonstrate the massive improvement that resilience can bring in a manufacturing enterprise. The critical issues and strength points in a supply chain are analyzed, in particular, trying to improve their resilience, a feature that has gained even more importance in recent years.

A Perspective on Remanufacturing Business: Issues and Opportunities

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Improving healthcare using cognitive computing based software: an application in emergency situation

The goal of this paper is to define the platform specifications dealing with medical information sharing both from research viewpoint and in terms of local health care. The purpose of this research work is based on doctor - patient relationships: VDS - Virtual Medical Doctor System. At this stage the platform is only used for scientific purposes. In particular, we assume the integrated design of the platform based on different levels (layers), which may be interconnected through the information flows (or links). The first level (the lower) involves the construction of a VDS platform. Based on this system it is possible to foresee a number of extensions such as social network for scientific research design, and risk analysis tool.

A methodological approach to manage WEEE recovery systems in a push/pull logic

This work aims at establishing a new management paradigm for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) collection and treatment networks, based on Lean Thinking methodological approaches. The objective is to maximize the WEEE recovery rate to effectively support the production of new products, creating on one side the conceptual basis of the Closed Loop Supply Chain, and on the other side minimizing the environmental impact of production processes in exploiting natural resources. The achievement of such results is supported by the application of a System Dynamics simulation approach.

A resilient approach to manage a supply chain network

Today we depend more and more on logistic networks, which often know nothing, or worse, on which our power of control is almost zero. It is impossible to imagine a life without certain types of products or food, all of that to get us often follow long and complex network and therefore vulnerable. Let see how increase in energy costs has engulfed many small companies. Differently by rising energy costs, there are also changes that are not so easily predictable, so it is essential for the survival of a company to have “redundant” resources, able to operate strategies and proactive behavior. Its important to be flexible and adapt better to the changes that are imposed by external or even internal conditions. More than on flexibility, it is necessary to focus on the concept of Resilience, which requires the ability to remain calm, to address a crisis, but maybe leave it weakened but with the strength, the ability and the confidence to create a tomorrow of own business, adapting to change.

Integrating model to support decision making

The aim of the paper is to investigate the integration of different analytical and simulations tools to support people to make decisions, and to show how the relationships among the different methods can be advantageous to solve specific problems. ORM (object - role modeling), PN (Petri Nets) and SD (System Dynamics) have been combined to capture the static and dynamic aspects of system.

Cost estimation in an aeronautical supply chain

The Customer Support in an aeronautical supply chain is the key element, present throughout the cycle life of the aircraft for customer loyalty and ensure a business long term. Every order is different since each customer requires that their aircrafts respect particular specifications, then it is necessary to carry out an estimation cost of spare parts Service each time there is a certain request. At present the calculation process used in order to define The Spare Parts Service is an “Exact Estimation” method, through the OPUS10 Tool, very accurate, but extremely expensive in terms of time and processing time. Since, unfortunately, not all orders come to a successful conclusion, in the first negotiation phase (RFQ) it is possible to use an approximated calculation method allowing a great time and thus costs reduction. This paper goal is to search a mathematical algorithm, in a necessary approximation circle, that can substitute an exact method with a parametric estimation methodology.

A decision support tool, implemented in a system dynamics model, to improve the effectiveness in the hospital emergency department

The emergency department of a hospital is, among all areas in which lean policies are focused, the one that has received the most attention. The emergency room, in fact, plays a vital role in providing primary care to patients and is also recognised for the contribution it gives to society. The important results in terms of cost savings and improving the flow due to the reduction of the waiting time of the patients, obtained from major international hospitals, were crucial to assess whether it was possible and useful to implement similar improvements in Italy, certainly not without to many problems in the provision of health services. This paper explores what can be improved for the department to be more efficient, using simulation techniques based on dynamic and continuous logics (system dynamics).

Design Support System of Fishing Vessel Through Simulation Approach

The objective of this work is to create a module for a ship maneuvering simulator, which will allow the training of the crews of vessels in deep water. In this work we developed a system of “artificial intelligence” to model marine biological entities: this system can simulate the movement of a school of fish in a realistic manner. In addition, we developed an analysis of the main instruments on board and problems relating to the virtual simulation.

A System Dynamics approach for the operational control of production

The objective of this work is the realization of a tool for decision support: a macro parametric model, consisting of two modules, the Flow Shop Main Module, representative of a typical production system and Sequencing Module, representative of the sequencing according to the FIFO rule of dispatching.