The main topics of research are:
§ Supply Chain
Management and analysis of supply chain performance
measurement.
§ Reverse
Logistics and Closed Loop Supply Chain (WEEE, ELV, solid urban
waste and industrial waste) .
§ Analysis of
the product life cycle, from the cradle to the grave, through the
use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. In particular the
Life Cycle Analysis of the reverse supply chain of Electrical and
Electronic Apparatus is considered, in the light of the recent
European Directive (2002/95/CE; 2002/96/CE) for the disposal of
WAEE (Waste of Electrical and Electronic Apparatus); LCA of
renewable energy systems and of an innovative agricultural machines
are conducted.
§ Risk
evaluation in industrial safety management and the introduction of
innovative techniques for the risk measurement.
§ Balancing of
manual assembly lines.
§ Lean
Manufacturing and Lean-Agile production.
§ Feasibility
and efficiency analysis of energy co-generation plant.
§ Package design
and warehouse capacity.
§ Scheduling
with optimization of set up time, under constraints of resources
and materials.
§ Analysis of
inspection time and test activities in made-to-order production
§
Location-allocation problem
Supply Chain Management
Supply chain management is a topics of great interest in
industrial field. The features of particular interest are: the
study of supply chain performance index, the modularization and
standardisation of the product and of the production process, the
group technology. The state of the art about the clustering methods
permits to compare and to analyse new methods.
Risk evaluation
Risk assessment constitutes a critical phase of the safety
management process. It basically consists of evaluating the risks
involved in the execution of working activities, so as to provide
the managers with information suitable to address intervention
measures. The most important activity in risk assessment is the
risk evaluation task but, despite its importance, national and
international regulations have never formalized a standard
methodology for addressing it, leaving companies complete freedom
to adopt the approach they consider appropriate. As a consequence,
companies generally settle on the use of simple methodologies which
frequently are not able to emphasize all the main aspects affecting
risk in the workplace and to produce a precise ranking of hazardous
activities. The research concern the definition of a new
methodology for risk evaluation with the aim to overcome
limitations of the classical approaches. In particular, new factors
are introduced to take into account effects of human behaviour and
environment on risk level, other than the classical injury
magnitude and occurrence probability of an accident. The proposed
methodology also integrates an estimative approach based on the
fuzzy logic theory, which permits more coherence in the evaluation
process, producing a very suitable final rank of hazardous
activities.
Assembly line balancing
A new heuristic for solving the assembly line re-balancing
problem has been studied. The method is based on the integration of
a multi-attribute decision-making procedure, named ‘‘Technique for
Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution'' (TOPSIS), and
the well-known Kottas and Lau heuristic approach. The proposed
methodology does not focus on the balancing of a new line, rather
it takes into account the more interesting current industrial
aspect of rebalancing an existing line, when some changes in the
input parameters (i.e. product characteristics and cycle time)
occur. Hence, the algorithm deals with the assembly line balancing
problem by considering the minimization of two performance
criteria: (i) the unit labour and expected unit incompletion costs,
and (ii) tasks re-assignment. Particularly, the latter objective
addresses the problem of keeping a high degree of similarity
between previous and new balancing, in order to avoid costs related
to tasks movements: operators training, product quality assurance,
equipment installation and moving.
Reverse logistics e LCA (Life Cycle
Assessment)
The recovery, recycle and remanufacturing of a product at the
end of its life is recently receiving much attention, due to the
growing interest in the reverse supply chain. Greater attention to
the environment, the development of waste regulations and
competition in industry as regards product recovery lead to the
creation of reverse logistics networks. This research deals with
the evaluation of the environmental and social impact of the
reverse supply chain, through the use of Life Cycle Analysis
methodology, the results of which can be used for policy and
strategy decision-making. This research investigates the reverse
supply chain of electrical and electronic equipment (RAEE) and in
particular it concerns the life cycle assessment of an household
refrigeration, in order to analyze the environmental and economical
impact of its closed supply chain.
Package design
Strategic reasons have led companies to keeping warehouses, such
as providing inventories for rapidly satisfying changeable
customers demand, along with protecting against unexpected delays
in the manufacturing process. However, warehouses involve costs,
due to both their construction and their management. Hence, the
optimal saturation of the available storage space is an important
issue to be pursued. Since packages dimensions and features
strictly influence pallet loading configuration, which affects
warehouses capacity, in this paper an algorithm for concurrent
package and warehouse design in accordance with the design for
logistics principles is presented. Particularly, the case of random
storage policy is considered, as a common method to manage
warehouses.
Scheduling
Flow-shop systems with machine bypass represent production
approaches currently widely adopted in several industrial fields
(i.e. electronics and belt industries). As a consequence of
differences in the manufacturing process, in those systems, jobs
are not forced to stop by each machine. Moreover, if a job does not
need processing on a machine, it can skip that machine and the very
job eventually residing there. A new heuristic for solving the
flow-shop scheduling problem with machine bypass is studied. The
algorithm is able to manage several scheduling performance
measures, finding a set of non-dominated solutions representing the
Pareto front. The heuristic integrates a priority rule and a local
search procedure with a Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM)
technique so as to drive the search direction towards good
trade-off solutions.
Location-allocation problem
The design and management of a multi-stage
production/distribution system is one of the most critical problem
in logistics and in facility management. This manuscript deals with
the so called facility location-allocation problem, i.e. with the
simultaneous decisions regarding the design, management, and
control of a distribution network. In particular the logistic
problem object of this study deals with the determination of the
number of facilities (e.g. production plants, warehousing systems,
distribution centers DCs, etc.), the choice of their locations and
the assignment of customers demand to them, incorporating also
tactical decisions regarding inventory control, production rates
and service level determination.
The purpose is to design, test, and compare innovative
cost-based models and solutions for the dynamic (i.e. multi-period)
location allocation problem (LAP) with safety stock levels
determination and customer service level optimization. An
experimental analysis conducted on an industrial application is
presented and discussed.
