Antonino Marvuglia

• PhD in Environmental Applied Physics
• Senior R&T Associate at Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST)

To curb the impacts arising from the agricultural sector, the actions undertaken by policymakers, and ultimately by the farmers, are of paramount importance. However, finding the best strategy to reduce impacts, and especially assessing the effects of the interactions and mutual influence among farmers, is very difficult. To this aim, this paper sh...

To curb the impacts arising from the agricultural sector the actions undertaken by policymakers, and ultimately by the farmers, are of paramount importance. However, finding the best strategy to reduce impacts, and especially assessing the effects of the interactions and mutual influence among farmers, is very difficult. To this aim, this paper sho...

The building and construction industry generates 40% of annual global CO2 emissions, aside from other environmental and social impacts, while it contributes to economic and societal development as a whole. Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) is a proven methodology to assess the environmental, social and economic impacts of a product system...

One of the main steps in developing urban building energy models (UBEM) is the classification of the building stock according to building archetypes. Different approaches have been proposed to accomplish this task, some based on the application of clustering techniques, or a combination of expert knowledge, deterministic classification, and data dr...

Given the complexity and interconnection of different aspects involved in building evaluation, one of the most relevant, and challenging, research topics is the integration of different domain models (such as thermal comfort, indoor environmental quality and occupant comfort) to effectively describe and inform improvement strategies for the behavio...

Biowaste and manure are resources readily available as feedstock for biogas production. Possible scenarios with increased use of biowaste and manure for biogas production in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg are investigated in this study using an Agent-Based Model (ABM) coupled with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). ABMs are particularly suitable to simula...

Agent-based models (ABMs) are particularly suitable to simulate human-natural systems since they allow modelers to consider the behavioral aspects of individuals. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has also been widely used in research, industry, and policy to assess systems' environmental sustainability. In this paper, we introduce a coupled ABM-LCA mode...

This research aims to develop a predictive model to discriminate milk produced from a cattle diet either based on grass or not using milk mid-infrared spectrometry and the month of testing (an indirect indicator of the feeding ration). The dataset contained 3,377,715 spectra collected between 2011 and 2021 from 2449 farms and 3 grazing traits defin...

The increasing pressure on land coming from the raising needs of a fast-growing population puts public and private landowners and decision makers in front of difficult choices concerning the best use of limited land resources. On one hand, agricultural land and grassland need to be used to support human food requirements. On the other hand, these l...

Cities consume almost 80 percent of world’s energy and account for 60 percent of all the emissions of carbon dioxide and significant amounts of other greenhouse gases (GHG). The ongoing rapid urbanization will further increase GHG emissions of cities. The quantification of the environmental impact generated in cities is an important step to curb th...

Supply Networks (SN) can be seriously affected by unplanned disruptions producing important consequences on system’s functioning. These alterations may have implications over dimensions of sustainability due to the re-adaptation of the network to cope with the disruptive event. In this sense, it is relevant to understand how sustainability can be m...

Agent-based models (ABMs) have been adopted to simulate different kinds of complex systems, from biological systems to complex coupled human-natural systems (CHANS). In particular, when used to simulate man-managed systems, they allow considering human behavioural aspects with the modelling framework. On the other hand, environmental Life Cycle Ass...

The construction industry is experiencing a technological transition towards Digital Twins from a static digital information environment to a more dynamic one, enriched with real-time sensing and Artificial Intelligence support. This paper describes a method for leveraging a building digital twin for monitoring the indoor environmental quality and...

Delivering sustainability in the buildings and construction sector requires innovation in the materials used and tools adopted to help promote low-carbon, zero-energy and resource-efficient buildings. This study has proposed an integrated building energy simulation (BES) and life cycle assessment (LCA) framework to inform the selection of sustainab...

Implementing nature-based solutions (NBSs) in cities, such as urban forests, can have multiple effects on the quality of life of inhabitants, acting on the mitigation of climate change, and in some cases also enhancing citizens’ social life and the transformation of customer patterns in commercial activities. Assessing this latter effect is the aim...

The effects of climate change on the built environment represents an important research challenge. Today, green roofs (GRs) represent a viable solution for enhancing energy and urban resilience in the face of climate change, as they can have a positive impact on the building's indoor thermal comfort and energy demand, as well as inducing various en...

As a natural conclusion and overarching output after our RESTORE previous Work Package specific dissemination products, this book extends the target group to all the decision makers, including – but not limited to – real estate developers, public administrators, entrepreneurs, politicians, citizens. That is because the global environmental, social,...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) such as rainwater gardens and permeable paving can be deployed as an alternative to conventional urban gardens to improve cities’ resilience against increasing rainfall. This study describes the application of an agent-based model (ABM) to assess the role of private gardens toward the enhancement of water management by...

Before the world was impacted by COVID-19, progress towards the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was already uneven, and a more focused attention was needed in most SDGs’ target areas. The pandemic abruptly disrupted plans and efforts towards urban transition, in some cases reverting decades of progress. The concept of resilience change...

This open access book is based on work from the COST Action “RESTORE - REthinking Sustainability TOwards a Regenerative Economy'', and highlights how sustainability in buildings, facilities and urban governance is crucial for a future that is socially just, ecologically restorative, and economically viable, for Europe and the whole planet. In light...

In this book, scale jumping potentials and approaches within regenerative practice are explored. It addresses the possibilities, problems and challenges of applying systems thinking to work towards the regenerative growth of our built environments. The publication presents the activities of the final RESTORE Working Group 5 (WG5) whose tasks were n...

The Human, Nature and Built-Environment nexus is visited in this chapter through the consideration of a number of Patterns. It is based on the imaginary of a city that addresses this nexus with symbiotic benefits for both nature and humans. For this chapter, we set ourselves four challenges: > addressing scale jumping, not just sustainable developm...

In a context where digital giants are increasingly influencing the actions decided by public policies, smart data platforms are a tool for collecting a great deal of information on the territory and a means of producing effective public policies to meet contemporary challenges, improve the quality of the city, and create new services. Within the fr...

Embedding nature-based solutions (NBS) in cities is expected to bring quantifiable benefits, including resilience to flooding, drought, and heatwaves, and air quality improvement. Among NBS, green roofs have an important role in temperature regulation in buildings and in lowering the damaging effects of heatwaves on human health. In this paper a sp...

With nearly 70% of the world population expected to live in cities by 2050, assessing the sustainability of urban systems, both existing and future ones, is becoming increasingly relevant. Making cities more sustainable is a global priority, which is highlighted by ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’ being listed as one of the Sustainable Developm...

Reducing the energy consumption of buildings is a priority for carbon emissions mitigation in urban areas. Building stock energy models have been developed to support decisions of public authorities in renovation strategies. However, the burdens of renovation interventions and their temporal distribution are mostly overlooked, leading to potential...

The improvement of the energy efficiency of building stocks represents an important contribution for the reduction of the energy consumption in the European Union (EU), along with the decrease of greenhouse gases emissions. In this aim both the public administrations and the technical experts need reliable calculation methodology to assess building...

Agriculture is one of the main assets of Pakistani and Indian economies, employing in both countries about 50% of the total labour force. Thus, improving agricultural sustainability in the Indo-Pak region has important implications for the local population as well as the rest of the world that relies on food imports from these countries. This artic...

Biogas power plants (BPPs) have been rapidly developing in Italy in the latest years, thanks also to major government subsidies, especially in Northern Italy where numerous agriculture and zoo technical Companies are located. In this paper, conventional Emergy Analysis (EMA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods are used to study the sustainabili...

In the constant pursue of the sustainability of socio-industrial systems, the definition of useful, reliable and informative, and at the same time simple and transparent, indicators is an important step for the evaluation of the circularity of the assessed systems. In the circular economy (CE) context, scientific literature has already identified t...

Agent-Based Models (ABMs) have been adopted to simulate very different kinds of complex systems, from biological systems to complex coupled human-natural systems. In particular, when used to simulate man-managed systems, they have the advantage of allowing human behavioral aspects to be considered in the modelling framework. This paper provides a l...

In the constant pursue of the sustainability of socio-industrial systems, the definition of useful, reliable and informative, and at the same time simple and transparent, indicators is an important step for the evaluation of the circularity of the assessed systems. In the circular economy (CE) context, scientific literature has already identified t...

Ambitious energy policies have been established in Luxembourg, which has one of the highest Gross Domestic Products (GDP) per capita in the world but still much depends on imported fuels and electricity. Born as an alternative to GDP, the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) is applied in this study as a framework to predict socio-economic...

Access to data on built environment databases makes nowadays possible generating models of the urban spaces to facilitate visualization and analysis of information and synthesize it in sustainability indicators to support urban planning decisions. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can greatly benefit from this wealth of potentially available information....

This paper synthesizes the authors’ experience in the area of integrated approaches coupling multi-objective optimization (MOO), industrial process modeling and simulation, and life cycle assessment (LCA), with particular application to the sector of drinking water production. An industrial process is intended as any process using a certain technol...

The high-frequency on-line measurements coming from sensors installed in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) can be used for alert systems and decision support tools. Given the complexity of WWTPs, many authors developed efficient techniques for plant assessment. By contrast, few contributions are focussed on the identification of regime shifts in...

Pumping systems account for a very relevant share of the energy consumption of infrastructures for water supply, treatment, use and disposal. For example, in wastewater treatment plants, (WWTPs) hydraulic pumps are responsible on average for more than 12% of the total energy demand of a plant. Acting on the correct sizing and operational control of...

Waste management is a serious challenge across many resource constrained countries of the world leading to environmental issues such as pollution and high rates of soil occupation, health issues induced by poor hygienic conditions, and financial problems linked to the high costs associated to waste management, which have high impacts on municipal b...

PurposeLife cycle assessment (LCA) practitioners face many challenges in their efforts to describe, share, review, and revise their product system models, and to reproduce the models and results of others. Current life cycle inventory modeling techniques have weaknesses in the areas of describing model structure, documenting the use of proxy or non...

Biogas power plants (BPPs) have been rapidly developing in Italy in the latest years, thanks also to major government subsidies, especially in Northern Italy where numerous agriculture and zootechnical Companies are located. This poster reports the Emergy Synthesis method applied to a 625kW biogas power plant, fed by agricultural and zootechnical b...

We build an ABM for simulation of incentives for maize to produce bio-fuels in Luxembourg with an aim to conduct life cycle assessment of the additional maize and the consequent displacement of other crops in Luxembourg. This paper focuses on the discovery of market price for crops. On the supply side we have farmers who are willing to sell their p...

Local search (LS) is an essential module of most hybrid meta-heuristic evolutionary algorithms which are a major approach aimed to solve efficiently multi-objective optimization (MOO) problems. Furthermore, LS is specifically useful in many real-world applications where there is a need only to improve a current state of a system locally with limite...

Buildings are responsible for a large share of the energy consumption and environmental impacts worldwide. An assessment of the energy demand and environmental performance of building stocks at large spatial scales is increasingly needed for decision support in sustainable planning and policy making. While current bottom-up building stock models ma...

This is intended to be a consensus document providing the state of the art in each of these areas with milestones for research and implementation needed to resolve current issues. The roadmap will be publicly available on the SETAC website for public comment. Once comments have been incorporated into the document, the working group plans to publish...

This paper presents a novel multi-stage optimization model for farm management during a certain planning time horizon. The salient features of this optimization model are the proper incorporation of crop rotation schemes and the consideration of crop impacts on the environment via linear environmental constraints. This decision support tool produce...

The paper is focused on the application of ABM (Agent Based Models) to simulate the evolution of the agricultural system of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which aims at the evaluation of the potential environmental impacts arising from policy implementation, following the methodology known as Consequential Life Cycle Assessment (CLCA). The novelty...

Agent-Based Models (ABMs) are becoming a widespread approach to model human-environment interactions. They belong to the class of individual-based modelling approaches, which allow a bottom-up representation of the system being modelled, eliciting its macro-level evolution while modelling the micro-level behavior of its individuals. This paper deal...

The use of biomass, among the various forms of renewable energy, has assumed a key role in the current European Union agenda. In 2005 the European Commission launched a “biomass action plan” in order to promote the development of biomass energy from wood, waste and agricultural crops and stimulate economic activities in ru-ral areas. Among the vari...

Demolition waste represents a significant portion of the total generated waste and has a high importance from both a waste management and a resource efficiency perspective. The urban context is highly relevant to assess the environmental impact of the end-of-life stage of buildings and potential for future reduction to properly design corresponding...

In the frameworks of environmental management and computational sustainability , this paper aims at improving, in a cost-effective manner, the sustainability of existing drinking water production plants (DWPPs) via multi-objective constrained optimization (MOO). Specifically, the paper explores the ability of global sensitivity analysis (SA) method...

Many real-world multi-objective optimization (MOO) problems rely on compu-tationally expensive simulators of industrial processes and require solutions within a limited time budget. In this context, we propose a heuristic approach which aims at building a surrogate problem model, solvable by computationally efficient optimization methods, in order...

Landmarks are unique points that can be located on every face. Facial landmarks typically recognized by people are correlated with anthropomorphic points. Our purpose is to employ in 3D face recognition such landmarks that are easy to interpret. Face understanding is construed as identification of face characteristic points with automatic labeling...

Empowering decision makers with cost-effective solutions for reducing industrial processes environmental burden, at both design and operation stages, is nowadays a major worldwide concern. The paper addresses this issue for the sector of drinking water production plants (DWPPs), seeking for optimal solutions trading-off operation cost and life cycl...

In eco-design, the integration of environmental aspects into the earliest stage of design is considered with the aim of reducing adverse environmental impacts throughout a product's life cycle. An eco-design problem is therefore multi-objective, where several objectives (environmental, economic, and technological) are to be simultaneously optimized...

conference paper, Enviroinfo 2015, 7-9 September, Copenhagen, Denmark

Conventional Life Cycle Inventories (LCIs) are static models not considering any mechanism of revenue maximization and price equilibrium under external constraints. The underlying assumption is that demand of a given commodity, irrespective of the amount, can always be supplied by the average supplier (fully elastic market). This constitutes a reco...

Multi-objective constrained optimization problems which arise in many engineering fields often involve computationally expensive black-box model simulators of industrial processes which have to be solved with limited computational time budget, and hence limited number of simulator calls. This paper proposes two heuristic approaches aiming to build...

Toxicity characterization of chemical emissions in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a complex task which usually proceeds via multimedia (fate, exposure and effect) models attached to models of dose-response relationships to assess the effects on target. Different models and approaches do exist, but all require a vast amount of data on the properties...

The implementation process of sustainable development goals poses considerable challenges to policy makers, as well as to scientists. This requires improving the knowledge on linkages between the key types of resources, the resources and the environment and the resources and the economy. The underlying challenges are inherently integrated and shall...

This paper deals with the optimization of key decision variables of a potable water production plant. To this end we propose a multi-objective constrained optimization approach which trades-off operational costs and environmental impact while satisfying outlet water drinkability criteria. The proposed solution approach consists in coupling a meta-h...

Toxicity characterization of chemicals’ emissions is a complex task which proceeds via multimedia fate and exposure models attached to models of dose–response relationships. Several different environmental multimedia models exist, but in any case a vast amount of data on the properties of the chemical compounds being assessed is required. This pape...

In practice many multi-objective optimization problems relying on computationally expensive black-box model simulators of industrial processes have to be solved with limited computing time budget. In this context, this paper proposes and explores the uses of an iterative heuristic approach aiming at quickly providing a satisfactory accurate approxi...

This paper addresses the multi-objective constrained optimization of a drinking water production plant. It reports the successful coupling between the Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA2), which is a well-established multi-goal elitist metaheuristic global optimizer, and EVALEAU, which is a state-of-the-art process modelling – life cycle...

Determining the relevance and importance of a technosphere process or a cluster of processes in relation to the rest of the industrial network can provide insights into the sustainability of supply chains: those that need to be optimized or controlled/safeguarded. Network analysis (NA) can offer a broad framework of indicators to tackle this proble...

The number of biometric solutions based on 3D face images has increased rapidly. Such solutions provide a much more accurate alternative to those using flat images; however, they are much more complex. In this paper, we present subsequent results of our research on a new representation of characteristic points for the 3D face. As a comparative meth...

The paper is focused on the application of ABM to simulate the evolution of the agricultural system of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg under the external shock of fostering the production of maize to be used for bio-methane generation. The modeling exercise is part of a larger scale effort, which aims at the evaluation of the potential environmental...

Environmental criteria have to be taken into account when it comes to selecting a specific building component among a set of candidates with the same function. This article presents a methodological approach e based on both Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) e for the selection of building components according to their...

Toxicity characterization of chemicals’ emissions is a complex task which proceeds via multimedia fate and exposure models attached to models of dose–response relationships. Several different environmental multimedia models exist, but in any case a vast amount of data on the properties of the chemical compounds being assessed is required. This pape...

In this paper we describe an approach that combines system optimization under environmental constraints with a detailed simulation of the processes of a working plant. Specifically, a flow-sheet-based model of a potable water production plant was developed and coupled with a Python script which allowed variation of operational parameters of the pla...

The paper concerns the architecture of a neuro-fuzzy classifier with fuzzy rough sets which has been developed to process imprecise data. A raw output of such system is an interval which has to be interpreted in terms of classification afterwards. To obtain a credible answer, the interval should be as narrow as possible; however, its width cannot b...

In recent years, the number of biometric solutions based on 3D face images has increased rapidly. Such solutions provide a much more accurate alternative to those using flat images; however, they are much more complex. In this paper, we present subsequent results of our research on a new representation of characteristic points for the 3D face. As a...

Evaluation of soil functionality in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has progressively gained importance, although only a small cluster of studies deliver detailed guidelines on how to calculate quantified indicators. In addition, there is a lack of bibliography assessing impacts on the pedosphere due to spatially differentiated land use changes (LUC)....

Luxembourg aims at complying with the EU objective of attaining a 14% use of bioenergy in the national grid by 2020. The increase of biomethane production from energy crops could be a valuable option in achieving this objective. However, the overall environmental benefit of such option is yet to be proven. Consequential Life Cycle Assessment (CLCA)...

This paper reports the emergy-based evaluation (EME) of the ecological performance of four water treatment plants (WTPs) using three different approaches. The results obtained using the emergy calculation software SCALE (EMESCALE) are compared with those achieved through a conventional emergy evaluation procedure (EMECONV), as well as through the a...

Purpose Consequential Life Cycle Assessment (C-LCA) is a “system modelling approach in which activities in a product system are linked so that activities are included in the product system to the extent that they are expected to change as a consequence of a change in demand”. Hence, C-LCA focuses on micro-economic actions linked to macro-economic c...

Conventional life-cycle inventories (LCIs) are static models not considering any mechanism of revenue maximisation and price equilibrium under external constraints. An additional demand of a given commodity, irrespective of the amount, can always be supplied by the average supplier under fully elastic market assumption. This constitutes a recognise...