Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica, Energetica e Gestionale - Tesi di Dottorato

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Questa collezione raccoglie le Tesi di Dottorato afferenti al Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica, Energetica e Gestionale dell'Università della Calabria.

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Author: search.filters.author.Mirabelli, Giovanni

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    Quantitative approaches for the integrated management of agri-food supply chains
    (Università della Calabria, 2021-06-10) Solina, Vittorio; Conte, Enrico; Mirabelli, Giovanni
    In recent years, the development of global markets and higher expectations from end customers have forced the supply chain players to better coordinate and integrate their plans, in order to maintain high levels of performance and be competitive on the market. Today, in fact, companies compete not only on product price or quality, but also on the reliability and timeliness of deliveries. Managing a supply chain in an integrated and coordinated manner is even more complicated and challenging, with reference to the agri-food context, where the constraints about quality and safety of goods, that are usually perishable, are much more stringent than in other sectors. By coordinating the various activities, it is possible to make supply chains more efficient and sustainable, as products can be made and distributed in the right quantity, at the right time and to the right customer. In support of integrated planning, new technologies are recently spreading, with the aim of making the sharing of data and information between the various actors safe and efficient. In this regard, the blockchain is among those technologies, whose interest has grown the most in recent months, both from the academic and business world. The present dissertation mainly aims to develop, test and validate novel quantitative approaches for the integrated management of agri-food chains. • In Chapter 2, a review of the main scientific works published in the last 15 years is proposed, referring to the integration of production, storage and distribution activities, via optimization strategies, within perishable supply chains. In this context, in order to identify effectively the different research gaps and to suggest possible future challenges, a five-dimension classification framework is proposed. This review is the starting point for the following 3 chapters, which address as many case studies. • In Chapter 3, an optimization model is designed for the simultaneous management of the storage and distribution of agricultural products. It is used to maximize the profits of a real company, which deals with the planting, growing, harvesting, storage and distribution of cauliflowers to a main customer and to spot customers. A hybrid fresh-/old-first inventory management policy is modeled to balance the quality of the delivered product and limit the amount wasted. The model improves the current practices of the firm and supports effectively the day-to-day decisionmaking regarding the quantities of product, for each age, to be stored and distributed to each customer. • In Chapter 4, a model is instead developed and tested to integrate the activities of production (i.e., harvesting), storage, distribution and routing of perishable agri-products. The case study refers to two companies, located in Southern Italy. At the tactical level, the proposed model determines the optimal value of two important operating parameters: the frequency of the harvesting activities and the service level to be guaranteed to customers. At the operational level, instead, the model is a valid tool to suggest to the company, day-to-day, the optimal quantities to harvest, store, distribute, and the routes to travel to reach customers, in order to maximize profits and contain waste. In this context, considering that the companies of the case study share some customers and are not in competition, as they are heterogeneous in terms of marketed products, the possibility of horizontal collaboration is also explored. The collaboration, as intended in this Chapter, implies that one of the two actors makes its own fleet of vehicles available, in exchange for a fee. In this context, a heuristic framework is proposed and validated. It suggests collaborating day by day, only if collaboration is economically convenient for both the companies. Computational tests, carried out on randomly generated instances, reveal that the collaboration can guarantee significant savings in terms of CO2 emissions and therefore make the supply chain more sustainable. • Chapter 5 deals with the integration of the production, storage and distribution activities of a company in the vegetable sector. In the production field, a scheduling problem is solved, which takes into account the set-up times of the production line, the hourly fluctuations in the energy price and the perishable nature of raw materials. In the distribution field, instead, it is necessary to schedule deliveries in terms of quantity of shipped products and days. The proposed model allows to schedule both production and distribution in an integrated way. Two rescheduling strategies are tested, to adequately react to customer demand, which occurs on a weekly basis. The first reproduces the current behavior of the company, while the second allows to improve current practices and jointly minimize the costs of energy, storage and distribution. • In Chapter 6, considering the recent proliferation of scientific works on the theoretical or practical use of blockchain technology in the agri-food sector, a literature review on this topic is proposed. This tool, since it allows the real-time sharing of information between the various players in the supply chain in a safe and efficient way, can facilitate the coordination of production and distribution plans, which is the main subject of the previous chapters of this thesis work. The aim is to identify current research trends and inform the reader about the degree
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    Innovative solutions for cooperative training in the maritime domain
    (2014-10-28) Nicoletti, Letizia; Pagnotta, Leonardo; Mirabelli, Giovanni
    The chapter presents the general architecture of the CTSIM framework that is an advanced solution for cooperative training of car terminal operators. This chapter is mostly focused on the vehicle simulator and on the operator simulator that are mainly addressed to drivers and parkers operators. Indeed, the analysis of car terminals operational processes has clearly shown that their performance has a direct influence upon the overall system performances. Before going into the substance of the CTSIM design and development, a preliminary study of the state of art has been carried out. The literature review has confirmed that Modeling & Simulation has been profitably used for operators training in port environments. Indeed, many simulators are currently available for training of different operators, namely ships pilots, forklift operators, Reach Stacker operators, Straddle Carrier operators, Gantry Crane operators, Offshore Crane operators, Tower Crane operators, etc. However, there is a lack of research in the field of 3D Virtual Simulators for operators working in car terminals. Moreover the analysis of the current procedures used in car terminals has further validated the research idea CTSIM relies on confirming the potential benefits of Modeling & Simulation in such a dynamic and complex environment. In such a context, the high number of procedures that each person has to learn and how workers interact each other are relevant, therefore CTSIM is a modular simulators system composed by three interoperable simulators: an Operator Simulator, a Ship Simulator and a Vehicle Simulator. The Vehicle Simulator is able to simulate a medium car, a truck (tractor and trailer) and all the procedures performed by a driver in a car terminal while the Operator Simulator simulates with a high accuracy all the movements and gestures of a parker thanks to a technical solution which the Kinect, a tracking glove and a joystick are part of. The simulators that are part of CTSIM are integrated according to the paradigms of distributed simulation so as to be able to interact each other sharing the same virtual environment. The connection is guaranteed by a TCP/UDP protocol also able to work on separated computers; this way it is possible to have more than one Vehicle Simulator and more than one Operator Simulator for cooperative training.
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    Effective traceability management: the global track&trace system
    (2013-11-27) Pizzuti, Teresa; Pagnotta, Leonardo; Mirabelli, Giovanni
    The evolution of the information technologies and their impact in human life promotes an increasing demand of reliable information when security and safety plays a primary role. Nowadays, food traceability represents one of the main concerns for public authorities and industries. In particular, traceability has become a critical part of the agro-food industry. The aim of the agro-food traceability is to allow the full monitoring of a product in the supply chain and to trace the history of a good from the producer to the consumer. It is therefore a preventive instrument of quality and safety management. The proposed research study is oriented to the definition of a new Global Track and Trace (T&T) System in which the entire world’s partners of a product’s supply chain are involved. In this system the functionalities of a conventional traceability system are combined with the functionalities of a Food Ontology for the traceability domain. The Food Ontology is defined in order to solve the issue of information-systems integration and standardization. The idea is to recover and to have available in a short time period all the relevant information about a product. This is a critical issue especially in case of foodborne outbreak and food crisis. The proposed framework can be a strategic approach for information and process management, also at the farm level. The model permits the Supply Chain optimization and the food quality management. The system itself can be a valuable tool for assuring customers and promoting the liability of the production process, along with the compliance with the regulatory standards aimed at defining quality and safety requirements.
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