Luca Canetta

Modeling and Simulation Tool for Sustainable MC Supply Chain Design and Assessment

Supply chain design, management and assessment are key success drivers in nowadays globalised economy. With the advent of new paradigms such as sustainability and mass customization, a new generation of tools is required. This work presents a supply chain simulation tool that allows to take into account the specificity of mass customized markets, efficiently dealing with the adjustable product physical structure and the complexity of handling customized Lot Size One orders. Moreover, this tool is integrated with a sustainable Assessment Engine that allows to configure, since the product design phase, the entire supply chain in a lifecycle perspective. In order to ensure a wide applicability of the tool, this is developed using a client-server architecture and exploiting a Shared Data Model that facilitates the integration of many applications coming from different providers thus giving a powerful decision support tool to companies’ decision makers.

Towards sustainability assessment: Reference data model for integrated product, process, supply chain design

Sustainability is an emerging factor companies are called for considering in their business according to the growing people-awareness about the impact of their behaviour as customers against environmental, social and economic issues. However, companies seldom manage to focus on sustainability all along the design and decisional process due to lack of proper sustainability measurement systems and/or inability to propagate this analysis on all the actors involved in the extended production system definition. This paper presents a novel approach aimed at supporting an integrated product, production system and supply chain design for sustainability. This goal will be pursued by, first, providing the system architecture of a system that supports the design activities taking place at the abovementioned three levels and, second, a data model encompassing all the required entities of the design for implementing the sustainability assessment.

The intelligent web: Tools for knowledge management and sharing

Modern companies and enterprises, to be competitive, need to be able to capture, integrate, connect, manage and share heterogeneous information and knowledge, about the different actors and elements involved in their systems: processes, activities, procedures, people, documents, etc. Knowledge comes from different sources, in different formats, and sometimes is implicit and not written; in addition, it dynamically evolves, it often requires the contribution of a collaborative team. This paper describes how intelligent web tools can provide new opportunities for knowledge representation, formalization, management and sharing. It firstly introduces the concept of “intelligent web” as a synergic combination of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies. The second part of the paper presents the AWI environment to demonstrate the practical applicability of the intelligent web approach for knowledge management, in particular in the field of manufacturing and business process management.

Sustainability Assessment and Advisory in Mould&Die: Implementation Challenges and Solutions

The paper describes a possible but concrete implementation pattern that is currently used to introduce and apply a sustainability-centered strategy in a mould&die company (INTERROLL SA). Focus of the analysis, implementation requirements, designed procedures and a draft software architecture are here outlined, forming the conceptual basis for a value-adding and easily adoptable approach intended to promote the implementation of a so widely-speculated strategic theory. The described path could be easily adapted to other mould&die companies and further extended to different industrial sectors.

Academic-industrial international cooperations for engineering education

The Institute CIM for Sustainable Innovation (ICIMSI), being part of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), supports local industrial and service sectors through knowledge creation and transfer. In this framework, ICIMSI develops various initiatives in engineering education and learning both concerning continuous education and higher education. The paper presents the strategy followed by ICIMSI in each of these initiatives as well as the level and type of involvement of the industrial partners. The courses genesis, their structure and their contents are also pointed out.

RFID–ERP Key Data Integration Challenges

This chapter provides an overview of the potential utilisation of RFID in the manufacturing context. More specifically the specificity of RFID applications, in terms of application fields, objectives, drivers, potential benefits, are analysed for various manufacturing strategies. The characteristics of the market context and of the structure of the manufacturing/assembly system having a significant impact on RFID application are identified and their influence described. An extensive review of industrial case studies classified according to the various manufacturing typologies (ETO, MTO, ATO, MTS, Retailing & Distribution) is provided. This allows to better assess the steps to be undertaken for developing a successful RFID applications, understand the activities to be included, identify the challenges, estimate the potential benefits and the required investments.

An advisory tool for sustainability-driven maintenance. A real case in mould and die industry

Maintenance impacts on environmental, economical and social performances of a product are often overlooked or underestimated. Especially for durable goods, maintenance should positively influence the product sustainability profile extending its lifespan, but, negatively, it also adds operations and materials usage. Available sustainability (mostly environmental) assessment tools either do not consider maintenance impacts, or compute them just for already produced products, this extremely limiting (or even inhibiting) the capability to improve the sustainability profile of under-design products. The here presented tool, based on a Naïve Bayes Classifier, real-timely computes the sustainability performances of under-design moulds, thus advising the mould designer towards better performing design choices. The paper presents the tool development process and achieved results, exploiting the advantages of the selected target product: a long-lasting, frequently maintained capital good.

An integrative approach improves sustainability impacts of innovation. An empirical study

A review of recent literature in the field indicates there is an increasing interest in improving sustainability performances of manufacturing. The integrated innovation of product, process and supply chain can be a promising way to improve economic, social and environmental performances of manufacturing enterprises, but there is still a lack of empirical evidence on the topic. This paper compares the sustainability-related performances of three different states, which a unique business context went through. The final state, a small-sized mini-factory for the local transformation of sheep wool, outperforms the other (more traditional) configurations in terms of social end economic impacts, with just partial advantages in terms of environmental performances.

Software Support for Sustainable Supply Chain Configuration and Management

A methodology for the inclusion of sustainability assessment in the design of supply chains is introduced, with the aim of taking into account a sustainability perspective in logistics and industrial allocation choices. The presented approach is based on the initial collection and organization of data related to all stages of the product life cycle and of the possible alternative choices to be made for each production and transport stage. An optimization algorithm is then used to prune the space of alternative solutions and an advanced and flexible graphical user interface allows the exploration of the solution space.

Human-centric data model and data integration platform enabling personalized product service systems for healthcare

This work describes a Human-Centric Data Model (HCDM), designed for easily ensuring a high level of scalability in order to be applied in many different scenarios, dealing with the production of personalized goods and the development of enhanced services for improving the wellbeing of specific target groups of people. The HCDM is integrated into a comprehensive system architecture, going from sensors development to services provision. The characteristics of the proposed HCDM have been defined accordingly to the objectives of the product service systems to be offered as well as to the nature of the available sensors. A particular attention has been devoted to the data modeling, storage and analysis in order to ensure efficient personalized real-time synchronous services directly managed by the user while fostering the development of asynchronous services involving a wide variety of external service providers.