Alessandro Persona

• Professor (Full) at University of Padua

OCCUPATIONAL APPLICATIONSWe investigated the impact of wearing a passive back-support exoskeleton on posture, task duration, and subjective feedback during order-picking tasks. Participants performed a simulated and repetitive picking task both with and without the exoskeleton, using a randomized placebo methodology to investigate the psychological...

In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Industry 5.0, driverless material handling technologies are becoming a mainstay of production and distribution facilities and have never been so close to human workers. Laser Guided Vehicles (LGVs) and Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), with open navigation routes, are increasingly being used in diff...

The precise estimation of the performance of an order picking system can hugely resent from its availability; availability resents from the presence of behavioral aspects that are difficult to predict, such as the variability of human efficiency due to the influence of individual productivity profiles. These subjective factors are closely related t...

Today's market demands always more different products with smaller batch sizes. Consequently, it is important for manufacturing systems to be reactive and flexible in meeting customer requirements. These systems are designed to respond to this changeable demand quickly and economically, considering different layout strategies. Moreover, in assembly...

The human-centered workplace design philosophy and the operator 5.0 concepts are gaining ground in modern industries moving through the personalization of the operators’ workplace for improving workforce well being and capabilities. In such a context, new assistive technologies, such as passive exoskeletons, are good candidates to be wisely adopted...

In recent years, increased emphasis has been placed on improving decision-making in business and government. A key aspect of decision-making is being able to predict the circumstances surrounding individual decision situations. Examining the diversity of requirements in planning and decision-making situations, it is clearly stated that no single fo...

Unlike traditional Fixed Worker (FW) assembly systems, in which an operator remains in the same workstation performing repetitive tasks, in the Walking Worker (WW) ones the operators travel along the line stations to produce the finished product. Interestingly, such a configuration enables to achieve a greater level of production volume flexibility...

E-commerce is always more diffused as a selling channel around the whole world market, and its importance has increased and continues to increase with the COVID-19 pandemic emergency. It provides enterprises a lot of opportunities, as the importance of physical stores to sell goods is bypassed. However, it has also changed the role of logistics in...

In an assembly system, balancing the line and designing the part feeding setting play a fundamental role in guaranteeing efficiency and effectiveness. Although these two aspects are interrelated, they are usually performed subsequent to each other, with the part feeding decisions only being made once the line has already been balanced. However, the...

Recently, the need for assembly systems of better following the market demand has led to the spread of alternative solutions with respect to the traditional fixed worker strategy. Walking worker systems, where operators move across the line to produce the finished product, are gaining always more interest. In this paper, a comparison between the fi...

In fixed-position assembly systems (or assembly islands) for big-size highly customised products, workers and parts move around the sub-assemblies, which stay fixed in one place. Generally, there are several parallel assembly islands and a single product is assembled in each of them. In some cases, assembly workers can also do the parts feeding act...

The European manufacturing industry is entering a new era in which working populations are ageing. The E.U. had set itself strategy objectives to increase the labour market participation of older workers. However, practical limits arise, and a complete rethinking of operation management strategies and manufacturing systems design and management is...

Sustainability in parcel delivery is a growing area of interest, especially for third-party logistics providers (3PLs). The recent increase of urban population is directly related to the increase request of goods in urban areas, and consequently to the growth of the urban freight transport and CO2 emissions. For these reasons, national and local in...

The European manufacturing industry is entering a new era in which working populations are ageing. The E.U. had set itself strategy objectives to increase the labour market participation of older workers. However, practical limits arise, and a complete re-thinking of operation management strategies and manufacturing systems design and management is...

To meet the challenges and needs of an ever-changing market and as part of the fourth industrial revolution, factories are transforming into increasingly automated environments. A widely used and well-established solution today is Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), which often work closely with humans in crowded environments. Thus, in addition to fl...

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a very diffused industrial tool used to improve and guarantee efficiency of industrial plants.. Significant financial savings are achieved by TPM, thanks to the involvement of all staff, from management till production operators, through all functions. It requires time and resources to be successfully implement...

Reliability analysis based on field downtime data is carried out in a bottle production plant. The main objective is to individuate the core inefficiency causes of the worst production line in terms of OEE; the analysis pointed out that the main cause is represented by "microdowntime", that are short production stops not directly related to mechani...

Supply Chain Network Design is a crucial area of Supply Chain Management which is responsible for long-term decisions with high monetary impacts. Some of the most important practices included in the SCN Design are the production allocation, supplier selection and in particular the site localization and sizing. In recent years, Supply Chains are bec...

This paper aims to evaluate worker’s availability for tasks and general activities that require a high level of physical effort, in order to study human availability in the industrial context. According to many studies, when physical effort for a specific working time is higher than a threshold value, workers are subjected to fatigue and so recover...

Supply Chain Network Design (SCND) is the process of analysing and determining the infrastructure of a Supply Chain (SC). Several parameters of a SCND problem have inherent uncertainties making them essential to consider. The aim of this work is to investigate the relationship between investing in redundancies and the increment in supply network co...

Purpose Vertical lift module (VLM) is a parts-to-picker system for order picking of small products, which are stored into two columns of trays served by a lifting crane. A dual-bay VLM order picking (dual-bay VLM-OP) system is a particular solution where the operator works in parallel with the crane, allowing higher throughput performance. The pur...

Ergonomic aspects have a crucial role in manual assembly systems. They impact on the workers’ health, final product quality and productivity. For these reasons, there is the necessity to integrate them into the assembly line balancing phase as, whereas, only time and cost variables are considered. In this study, human energy expenditures are consid...

Small items order picking is a very labour-intensive activity which is often performed in a dedicated area equipped with carton racks and with the operators walking within the aisles to pick the required products. Recently, improvements in automated solutions have been introduced to ease the picking activities and to reduce the impact of human labo...

The paper presents a systematic literature review on big size product manufacturing systems in MTO and ETO environments. In particular, the analysis is focused on highly customised, big and heavy products, calling for highly engineering solutions. This kind of products are characterised by low-volume demand, complex material bills, need of more tha...

The vision of Industry 4.0 foresees also much lower time delays between activities and feedback control. Among factors which influence delays in supply chains are long distances between activities in a complex global supply chain and the response latency of older workers, in the case that there are no properly developed programs for avoiding this p...

In Europe, the number of people aged 65 or older is about to grow from 85 million today to more than 151 million in 2060, with a decrease of 20 million in the number of workers. To keep the public finances and pension funds sustainable, the retirement age of industrial workers in national pension schemes is rising. However, workers in some specific...

In a manual picker-to-parts picking warehouse, a usual approach is to divide the whole stocking area in two different zones, the reserve and the forward areas. The dimensioning of the forward area, which is dedicated to picking activities, has an important impact on the overall performance of the picking system. Indeed, its size as well as the item...

Manual activities are still present in production systems, such as order picking in warehouses, material handling in production systems, loading and unloading of work centres. Many scientific contributions have widely demonstrated production system efficiency is strictly linked to the operator wellbeing. In fact, activities at different pace and du...

Purpose In order-picking activities, the performance of the system can be influenced by different variables such as the order to be fulfilled, the distance to be covered or the experience of operators. Usually, this kind of activity is performed by operators rather than machines to assure flexibility. Consequently, their fatigue accumulation can d...

Purpose Automated flow line manufacturing systems are becoming more and more relevant in industry, especially in the food and beverage sector. Improving the efficiency of automated flow line manufacturing systems is the core objectives of all companies as measured by the OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) index. The purpose of this work is to p...

To maintain a production or logistic system in a state as it could perform its output is the core maintenance goal. Maintenance represents a cost for industrial realities but it is also a strategic function necessary to be competitive in the market. The Age Replacement Policy is the most diffused maintenance strategy and it is characterized by peri...

This study incorporates human energy expenditure and the related rest allowance into a SALBP-2. During last years, the impact of human factors on the assembly line design has grown up and ergonomic restrictions, worker skills, physical and psychological conditions have been considered in the assembly balancing. In this work, the human energy expend...

An automated parts-to-picker picking system usually consists of an automated warehouse, with Automatic Storage and Retrieval Systems (AS/RS) that retrieve the Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) of the various needed products from their stocking locations, and of a picking area, with human operators or robots that pick the needed items in order to create a...

In many industrial environments, picking operations are performed with tow trains in order to efficiently feed a production or an assembly system. This operation is often time-consuming, especially for the automotive environment, which employs the supermarket concept very often to manage thousands of different parts. This research aims at improving...

In an industrial context it is not easy to evaluate how to assign activities to operators for reaching the improvement of the performance of the system, since the influence of the activities on the operators is strictly linked to their personal characteristics. Moreover, during the performance of the activity, the operators experience physical fati...

Due to their current operating context, all logistics processes, from the simplest to the most complex ones, are facing always more interesting challenges in terms of management of a huge variety of products and, at the same time, strict lead times. In such a framework, it turns out that logistics inevitably has to aim at avoiding or, at least, red...

The paper presents the VR-Ergo Log system, an inertial motion capture system integrated with immersive reality and combined with a heart rate monitoring. By using immersive reality, the operator will be able to move and interact within a virtual workplace environment, in order to permit a fast and efficient ergonomic assessment of future workplace...

Over the last decades, academics and practitioners have paid much attention to lot-sizing, which determines economic order and production quantities by balancing inventory holding and setup cost. Recently, researchers have started to integrate sustainability issues into lot-sizing models. The focus of these works has been on environmental and econo...

Manual assembly lines are flow-line production systems where human operators perform the various tasks needed to obtain the final product in different assembly stations which are directly linked to each other. Up to now, different models have been developed, which, for example, define the best line configuration in order to reduce the total costs o...

In an order picking system the aim is to obtain an increase of the overall performance not only to reduce costs but also to guarantee the fulfilment of the customer's needs. In most cases, this activity is carried on by operators for the flexibility this can assure. To improve the performance of this kind of system it could be useful to consider mo...

Over the last decades, academics and practitioners have paid much attention to lot-sizing, which determines economic order and production quantities by balancing inventory holding and setup costs. Recently, researchers have started to integrate sustainability issues into lot-sizing models. The focus of these works has been on environmental and econ...

Obwohl in den vergangenen Jahren zunehmend voll- und teilautomatisierte Kommissioniersysteme auf den Markt gekommen sind, ist die Kommissionierung in vielen Unternehmen nach wie vor durch einen hohen Anteil manueller Arbeit gekennzeichnet. In manuellen Kommissioniersystemen kommt der IT-Unterstützung des Kommissioniervorgangs eine besondere Bedeutu...

This paper evaluates ergonomics indicators of order picking activities related to different pallet picking alternatives, namely a) picking from full pallets on the floor, b) picking from half pallets on the floor, and c) picking from half pallets on the upper rank of the shelf. The OWAS (Ovako Working posture Analysing System) index and the energy...

Not considering ergonomics in the assembly systems can bring to sub-optimal solutions and, in case of high levels of ergonomics risk in the tasks execution, several musculoskeletal disorders affecting the global performance of the assembly line. Several papers have been developed in the last years about how to integrate the ergonomics aspects into...

Manual order picking ranks among the most time- and cost-intensive activities in warehouses, and it has frequently been studied in the past. The aim of existing studies was to improve the operational efficiency of order picking processes mainly by developing planning models that help to reduce the time that is needed for order picking. As order pic...

Within a warehouse, the picking activity often relies on human operators. Therefore, when designing and evaluating a manual picking system, it is important to consider that, besides the high flexibility the pickers are able to warrant, they inevitably require an additional effort due to their ergonomic working conditions. In this paper, the authors...

Order picking is the most time-consuming and labor-intensive activity in warehousing. Due to the need to frequently handle items, order picking requires high human energy expenditure and poses a risk environment for workers to develop musculoskeletal disorders. The storage assignment policy in use has a significant impact on human energy expenditur...

The recent changes in customers' orders, which on one hand are becoming more frequent and on the other require smaller quantities of several products, inevitably impact the job of warehouse picking managers, who find themselves in the necessary position to satisfy a high pick volume in a short time window. Moreover, warehouse manual picking is trad...

Industrial applications often observe the difference between laboratory reliability test in standard conditions and component or system reliability when it is set in motion through different environments and real-world conditions. As a matter of fact reliability variable is considerably influenced by environmental factors. Environmental factors may...

This paper explores the closed loop supply chain (CLSC) topic by providing a model and evaluating regular humanitarian logistics (R-HL) where the main objective of the operation moves from the reduction of population needs to a minimisation of the overall impact of the disaster and operations. The research focuses on the logistic facility managemen...

Determining safety stock is one of the most critical issues in inventory and logistics management. This paper presents a cost-based analytical model to determine the best safety stock and customer service level for uncertain demand of products during generic replenishment lead times and a continuous-review inventory system. The proposed model uses...

One aspect that has mostly been overlooked in traditional economic lot-sizing is the implication of decisions on manual tasks and workload. Although lot-sizing decisions can have a significant impact on required manual material handling and on human performance, works that consider ergonomic aspects in lot-sizing are rare. This paper presents a mod...

Worldwide, production systems are demanding new procedures and tools towards responsible inventory management, both in theory and in practice. In real industrial environment, manual fmaterial handling activities such as loading/unloading and stocking/picking operations are performed daily when a purchase/production material order is processed into...

In many assembly systems, ergonomics can have great impact on productivity and human safety. Traditional assembly systems optimisation approaches consider only time and cost variables, while few studies include also ergonomics aspects. In this study, a new multi-objective model for solving assembly line balancing problem is developed and discussed...

This work contributes to the practice of healthcare system modelling, by presenting an urgent issue: the growing process of integrated healthcare supply networks in reducing public healthcare systems' annual expenses and improving performance. Various critical aspects affect the strategic design and development of healthcare logistic networks in pr...

Most of the warehouse picking systems are based on manual activities, performed by human operators. Therefore, their performances and costs deeply depend on human availability and productivity, affected by the fatigue of operators and the probability of injuries and their gravity. In this paper, a real case studies analysis concerning the ergonomic...

Purpose – Warehouse picking is often referred to as the most labour-intensive, expensive and time consuming operation in manual warehouses. These factors are becoming even more crucial due to recent trends in manufacturing and warehousing requiring the processing of orders that are always smaller and needed in a shorter time. For this reason, in re...

Of all the warehouse activities, order picking is one of the most time-consuming and expensive. In order to improve the task, several researches have pointed out the need to consider jointly the layout of the warehouse, the storage assignment strategy and the routing policy to reduce travelled distances and picking time. This paper presents the sto...

Purpose – The paper aims to focus on in-house part logistics design and management for assembly systems in which supermarket storage is adopted and coupled with an automated transportation system. In this context, this work aims to assess the transportation mode selection problem to speed up the preliminary design phase. Design/methodology/approac...

This paper faces one critical short term decision: the construction of routes for daily goods' deliveries in a distribution network. It investigates the possibility of applying a fixed routing strategy instead of a daily routing optimisation strategy, analysing the benefits derived from the driver's familiarity with his/her surroundings, customers'...

In this paper an Italian case study of post-earthquake operations was examined in order to understand what happened and in which modalities. In the first part of the work, the data collected are related to the existing theories in the field in order to reinforce and confirm the findings of previous published works by adding new practical evidence....

The fresh food industry is increasingly more interested in developing efficient and innovative solutions to guarantee quality and distribution sustainability; one of the main factors that influences such crucial aspects is packaging. This paper aims to perform a critical analysis of two existing packaging solutions, i.e. corrugated fibreboard boxes...

Although multi-criteria decision making topic is well suggested by some papers there are no researches that have been focused on its application into humanitarian operations with the presentation of a hierarchy process to support the operators in making choices. The purpose of this paper is to present a general multi-criteria decision making proces...

This work contributes to the practice of healthcare system modelling, by presenting an urgent issue: the growing process of integrated healthcare supply networks in reducing public healthcare systems’ annual expenses and improving performance. Various critical aspects affect the strategic design and development of healthcare logistic networks in pr...

Transportation costs are becoming increasingly important in inventory replenishment decisions and, in practice, lot sizing decisions are strongly affected by material handling equipment, transportation flow paths, vehicle capacities and technical constraints. Companies within a global sourcing context daily experience the cost of transportation as...

The present paper introduces an innovative full-body system for the real-time ergonomics evaluations of manual material handling in warehouse environments, where all parts of the body are interested during the activities execution. The system is based on inertial sensors with integrated compensation of magnetic interference and long wireless connec...

Determining the economic lot size has always represented one of the most important issues in production planning. This problem has long attracted the attention of researchers, and several models have been developed to meet requirements at minimum cost. In this paper we explore and discuss the evolution of these models during one hundred years of hi...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to extend a routing model so that it may be applied to a real case study of material deliveries involved in a development operation, typical of regular humanitarian logistics, and to explore the impact of variations in available logistic assets. Design/methodology/approach – The introduced model is a conceptu...

Purpose – Logisticians in the worldwide industry are frequently faced with the problem of measuring the total cost of holding inventories with simple and easy-to-use methodologies. The purpose of this paper is to look at the problem, and in particular illustrate the inventory holding cost rate computation, when different kind of warehousing systems...

Every item produced, transported, used and discarded within a Supply Chain (SC) generates costs and creates an impact on the environment. The increase of forward flows as effects of market globalization and reverse flows due to legislation, warranty, recycling and disposal activities affect the ability of a modern SC to be economically and environm...

Traditional inventory models involve different decisions that attempt to optimize material lot sizes by minimizing total annual supply chain costs. However, the increasing concern on environmental issues stresses the need to treat inventory management decisions as a whole, by integrating economic and environmental objectives. Recent studies have un...

All manufacturing companies define their business strategies and competitive priorities based on several factors related to their production systems, like flexibility, productivity and quality. As a consequence, maintenance plays a crucial role in guaranteeing availability and reliability of production facilities; hence, designing proper maintenanc...

In the last decades, various maintenance policies have been developed and widely used, including, but not limited to replacement policy and preventive maintenance policy, depending on an accurate estimation of the reliability and the failure intensity functions. Many studies, yet, haven't considered the environmental factors (EFs) and their effects...

A growing number of manufacturers are adopting the so-called supermarket strategy to supply components to the production system. Supermarkets are decentralized storage areas used as intermediate warehouses for parts required by the production system (typically assembly lines). Such a feeding system is widely used in the automotive industry where as...

Following just-in-time principles, a growing number of manufacturers are adopting the so-called supermarket concept. Supermarkets are decentralised storage areas scattered throughout the shopfloor that serve as an intermediate store for parts required by nearby assembly lines. From these stores, a certain number of handling operators deliver parts...

Purpose The purpose of the present research is to explore the current situation and future expectations on whether to self‐manage or outsource logistics operations in centralized healthcare networks, and to analyse and quantify the relationships between logistics outsourcing, costs and performance. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on...

In today's industrial reality distribution network optimisation is one of the most crucial topics and in particular, supply chain management (SCM), is widely studied and discussed. SCM plays an even more critical role within the food industry network, where, both on the manufacturer's/wholesaler's side and the retailer's side, the margins are conti...

Nowadays environmental, social, and political pressures to limit the impacts linked to CO<sub align="right"> 2 </sub> emissions are rapidly increasing. This paper aim at the solution of a new class of A routing problem: the sustainable routing problem, where the objective, unlike the classical approaches, is the CO<sub align="right"> 2 </sub> emiss...

In automatic production systems, the size of intermediate buffers significantly affects the success of the production system, especially when their functions is to protect the system from the inevitable processing time fluctuations caused by machine disruptions. In Battini et al. (2009), the authors provided a new experimental formula to define the...

Worldwide production systems are asking for new procedures and tools towards a Responsible Inventory Management, both in theory and in practice. Research in the Lot Sizing area is fundamentally driven by the first basic model (developed by Harris in 1913) and by a large set of succeeding incremental steps, developed in order to better reflect real...

Traditionally, packaging design has had a subordinate role with respect to product design and production systems design; however, its impact on supply chain costs and performances can be devastating. Only in the past few years its strategic role has been recognized both in theory and in practice. Although packaging design research attracted conside...

In order to increase flexibility and reduce costs, assembly systems are changing from simple mixed-model assembly lines, to multi-lines systems, where some components are assembled in secondary lines, called feeder lines, connected to the main line by a ‘pull philosophy’. The production of different models in such a complex multi-lines assembly sys...

The constant research for efficiency and flexibility has forced assembly systems to change from simple/single assembly lines to mixed model assembly lines, while the necessity to reduce inventory has led the transition from single to multi-line systems, where some components are assembled in secondary lines, called feeder lines, connected to the ma...