Marino Alge

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.

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.

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.

Empowering widespread shoe personalization via a 3D foot scanning App

Unceasing market request for personalization of consumer goods calls for more and more flexible production technologies, and for increasingly reliable means to gather precise pictures of what each customer desires. Fitting is especially crucial to accomplish personalization in footwear, where the prevailing of manual operations makes production flexibility quite easy, but the close interaction between shoe and foot requires extremely precise knowledge of the body part which is being gloved. In a still ongoing research project, the authors are developing a powerful smartphone App to perform a 3D scanning of a foot, whose preliminarily registered performances are here presented and discussed. The solution is expected to establish a new standpoint in the trade-off between the level of precision of the gathered data and the ubiquity and accessibility of the scanning functionality, thus empowering a widespread best-matched fit personalization in the footwear market.

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.