Giuseppe Vignali

Università di Parma | UNIPR · Department of Engineering for Industrial Systems and Technologies

Water scarcity is one of 21st century’s most pressing global issues. The anthropogenic pressure and climate change will be the main drivers of freshwater depletion in the coming decades. According to the FAO, the amount of water needed to support all human activities will be 20–30% higher by 2050. A closer look reveals how agriculture is a major co...

Over the last decade, resilience has become an indispensable aspect to be considered when managing supply chains given to the recent challenges they were subjected to. However, despite literature on supply chain resilience is copious, tools for quantifying the resilience of a business are lacking, especially when dealing with the a priori resilienc...

Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) methodology is more and more implemented by companies in several industrial fields for preserving workers’ safety through a structured behavioral intervention with measurable effects as part of a socially sustainable approach for health and wellness care at the workplace. Although the traditional BBS components have been...

In the context of agricultural waste management, the production of compost to fertilize the soil is a practice that presents benefits from both a technical-economic and an environmental point of view. However, the use of compost shows relevant issues related to storage, handling, and relocation. Pelletization is a promising technique to overcome su...

Resilience is a key issue for the food context as never before, given the several challenges that companies are subjected to such as the climate change, geo-political instability or price volatility. Literature returned a gap in terms of tools and metrics for determining and quantifying the resilience level of agri-food systems, and after a prelimi...

Plastic or bioplastic? Which is the least impactful flexible packaging solution for the environment? In literature, few works try to answer this question, and most of them are focused on food packaging applications, comparing only polylactic acid (PLA) with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or other virgin plastics. Besides these lacks in the litera...

Worldwide interest in food waste has been grown over the years. According to the FAO about one third of all food produced for human consumption in the world is lost or wasted each year, amounting to about 1,6 billion tons per year. Food waste can become a source of valuable compounds which may be used as ingredients in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, o...

This study is grounded in the growing significance of environmental sustainability and the widespread adoption of RFID technology across various industries and is aimed to explore the influence of RFID implementation in supply chains by developing a tool that calculates the net balance of CO2 annual emissions. The tool, known as “Return on the Envi...

The building sector is responsible for about 37% of the global carbon dioxide emissions, 6% of which result from concrete (and particularly cement) production. Using recycled and supplementary cementitious materials and adopting a whole building life cycle approach can be seen as multi‐beneficial strategies for materials' design. In this framework,...

Nowadays being resilient is a requirement of all companies and more in general supply chains, as a consequence of the frequent disruptions which repeatedly affect systems and challenge markets from different sides. But how to state whether a company and its related supply chain are resilient or not? To address the present issue, a literature review...

The aim of the work is to assess the environmental impacts of Ultra High Frequency RFID tags. Through a Life Cycle Assessment approach, two case studies have been investigated, namely a standard plastic and a paper-based tags. Primary data on tags’ components, manufacturing and transportation were collected, while secondary data for the raw materia...

Agriculture is a key driver of global biodiversity and economy. In the recent years, the over-exploitation of water resources, climate change and pollution have led to a global water crisis, exposing the agricultural sector to significant risks in both the short and long term. For these reasons, the development, and the optimization of the technolo...

The agricultural sector involves various environmental impacts, related to soil exploitation, water consumption and greenhouse gasses emissions. The advent of 4.0 technologies could help reduce them, e.g., by using sensors that constantly control the field. However, these solutions are often implemented by big producers that can easily bear their c...

In the context of great changes in the food industry, the aim of this research is to investigate if and how the implementation of 4.0 enabling technologies can enhance the economic, environmental and social sustainability of the food sector. A systematic literature review, using a combination of 12 keywords, was carried out on Scopus database with...

Agriculture is facing several very important challenges. Population growth means that more food must be produced to meet nutritional needs. However, this is putting excessive pressure on natural resources, such as water and land, which are heavily used for agricultural practices. For these reasons, we carried out a systematic review of existing stu...

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted all the weaknesses of manufacturing systems and supply chains. In this challenging context, smallholders have faced several crises mainly related to the difficulty of finding manpower for harvesting activities and the impossibility of distributing food, due to the forced closure of many distribution chan...

Industries today are facing new technological changes. Thanks to the introduction of new tools and technologies of the so-called Industry 4.0, industrial processes are becoming more automated and interconnected. In the meantime, laws and international meetings, such as the 2030 Agenda, ask companies to be more sustainable. Considering these premise...

A PID (proportional–integral–derivative) control has been implemented in a digital environment for the safety improvement of a food processing pilot plant. The system developed allows for the remote monitoring of the process parameters and the remote control on both the physical layer and the virtual one. The control has been developed under a LabV...

Purpose In the context of the Industry 4.0, this paper aims to investigate the state of the art of Italian manufacturing, focusing the attention on the implementation of intelligent predictive maintenance (IPdM) and 4.0 key enabling technologies (KETs), analyzing advantages and limitations encountered by companies. Design/methodology/approach A su...

The end of life of equipment is gaining interest among food companies who want to lower their environmental impacts. However, by considering their life cycle, is it the most impactful phase? To answer the question, a Life Cycle Assessment was carried out by comparing the manufacturing, use and final disposal of a food equipment. Primary data (mater...

This study will provide an overview and a description of the most promising alternatives to conventional thermal treatments for juice stabilization, as well as a review of the literature data on fruit and vegetable juice processing in terms of three key parameters in juice production, which are microbial reduction, enzyme inactivation, and nutrient...

This work describes a structured solution that integrates digital twin models, machine-learning algorithms, and Industry 4.0 technologies (Internet of Things in particular) with the ultimate aim of detecting the presence of anomalies in the functioning of industrial systems. The proposed solution has been designed to be suitable for implementation...

Industrial companies today are facing two important issues: the implementation of 4.0 technologies, that allow to automate and improve plant productivity, and the evaluation of more sustainable products and processes. In light of this, the present work aims at evaluating an industry 4.0 application, the automated guided vehicles (AGV), making consi...

High Pressure Processing (HPP) and Pressure Change Technology (PCT) are two non-conventional food stabilization technologies that guarantee high quality products with longer shelf lives. This study analyses whether these two technologies are also able to give benefits in terms of environmental impact. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is applied to the...

The behavior of a counter-current tube-in-tube heat exchanger for fluid foods, was simulated under different operating conditions with a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) parametric study. Three input parameters (product velocity vp,in, inlet product temperature Tp,in and inlet water temperature Tw,in) and two output parameters (outlet product tem...

Nowadays Life Cycle Assessment is usually adopted to evaluate the carbon footprint and water footprint of packaged foods considering the whole supply chain, but not many studies compare the results coming from the adoption of different Life Cycle Impact Assessment methodologies. Adopting the IPCC 2013, IPCC 2013 incl. CO2 uptake, ILCD 2011 Midpoint...

Inventory management represents one of the main criticalities that companies have to face. The challenge is twofold: being able to satisfy a demand whose behavior can significantly vary and be unpredictable in order to avoid stock-out situations, whilst limiting excessive stocks and consequently costs. Some factors can complicate this already inher...

Companies are paying attention to the reduction of their products’ environmental impact and consumer’s opinion is fundamental to understand which are the market strategies to be undertaken. Consumers are interested in environmental issue, but do they buy products taking scientific data into account? For example, according to literature, consumers b...

Today High Pressure Processing (HPP) is receiving interest thanks to its ability to stabilize foods preserving nutritional and sensorial characteristics. This work applies HPP on nutrient ricottas created in the Parmigiano Reggiano area and demonstrates not only its benefits, but also disadvantages, testing different pressures and packaging. Moreov...

In this paper, the development of a Digital Twin of a beverages pasteurization system for temperature monitoring, using NI Lab-VIEW control system toolkit, is described. A cyber-physical production system, composed of a real-time simulation tool and a controller, has been set up and tested on a pilot plant set up in a university laboratory. The pap...

The present manuscript aims at presenting some preliminary results from a literature review carried out on the existing documents dealing with Digital Twin models within the context of agri-food supply chain, in order to assess the state-of-art of such new technology for this promising field. The analysis considers both descriptive metrics (i.e., y...

Purpose Today plastic is the most used material for food packaging, but its incorrect disposal is creating environmental issues to oceans, soil and air. Someone believes that the solution is to ban plastic and substitute it with glass packaging. Is it the right choice? This study aims at comparing the environmental impact of bottles made of PET, R-...

The 2030 Agenda of the United Nations includes the objective of setting up sustainable production patterns by pursuing several Sustainable Development Goals. Among them, the “Responsible production and consumption” is a key topic in the food production and is strictly connected with the “Climate action”; the crucial point, however, is how to jointl...

The aim of the present work is to investigate the impact of the production process and heat treatment technology to produce sterilized apple puree in the case of a real industrial production line. The technologies considered for the sterilisation process are traditional indirect thermal heating and ohmic heating, while the results will be expressed...

In the last decades, different non-thermal and thermal technologies have been developed for food processing. However, in many cases, it is not clear which experimental parameters must be reported to guarantee the experiments’ reproducibility and provide the food industry a straightforward way to scale-up these technologies. Since reproducibility is...

Thanks to the spread of technologies stemming from the fourth industrial revolution, also the topic of fault diagnosis and assistance in industrial contexts has benefited. Indeed, several smart tools were developed for assisting with maintenance and troubleshooting, without interfering with operations and facilitating tasks. In line with that, the...

Logistics activities were included in the wave of changes brought with the advent of the fourth industrial revolution. Several applications can be recognized for several activities, aiming all at efficiently optimizing processes and consequently production and volumes. Among them, collaborative robots involved for instance in picking, palletizing o...

Color degradation is an important factor that affect the quality and acceptability of fruit juices and purees; several enzymes, as well as the microbial endogenous population are not only responsible for this phenomenon but for changes in flavor and texture. Traditional stabilization methods have been used to preserve these kind of products; howeve...

"The recovery of agriculture waste is one of the challenges of 2030 Agenda. Food and Agriculture Organization states that 30 % of the world’s agricultural land is used to produce food that is later lost or wasted, and the global carbon footprint corresponds to 7% of total greenhouse gases emissions. Alternatively, natural fibers contained in food a...

Safety critical environments – e.g. chemical and nuclear plants, oil and gas installations, manufacturing sites - typically present a high degree of complexity, especially in relation to the many causal interactions between technical, human and organizational elements. Such a structure poses a challenge for industrial safety, since it often produce...

The main goal of this paper is to describe the optimization of the inventory management process in a real context of perishable food products. The study involves one of the largest Italian HO.RE.CA. companies, located in the north of Italy and operating as a provider of the catering, commercial and welfare services. A simulation model was set up wi...

The need to increase circularity of industrial systems to address limited resources availability and climate change has triggered the development of the food waste biorefinery concept. However, for the development of future sustainable industrial processes focused on the valorisation of food waste, critical aspects such as (i) the technical feasibi...

The aim of this work is to evaluate several packaging and treatment processes for ricotta cheese in thermoformed trays. Shelf life has been evaluated considering microbiological aspects, colour variation and the quantity of Volatile Organic Compound (VOC). The first solution tested was Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP). Experimental tests were pe...

A comparative evaluation of the environmental/economic performance of High Pressure Processing (HPP) technology for food processing is made using Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodologies. Thermal pasteurization (TP), in the form of indirect system (with energy recovery) and of retort process, and modified atmosphere pa...

In the literature, many applications of Digital Twin methodologies in the manufacturing, construction and oil and gas sectors have been proposed, but there is still no reference model specifically developed for risk control and prevention. In this context, this work develops a Digital Twin reference model in order to define conceptual guidelines to...

One of the main issues addressed in the context of the well-known fourth industrial revolution (also called Industry 4.0) is the theme of operators’ safety at the workplace. To this end, several innovative solutions were proposed, aiming at reducing the likelihood of accidents. In line with these considerations, in this paper an online software sol...

The exposure of workers to mechanical vibrations represents a significant risk in many industrial sectors, due to the widespread presence of vibrating machines, and its assessment and reduction are actually considered a priority in the whole of the European context. The present work has a dual objective: (i) as a preliminary step, to analyse the st...

This paper proposes an economic/environmental evaluation of several reverse logistics scenarios for collecting packaged food waste from the retail chain of Emilia-Romagna region (Italy), shipping it to a set of distribution centres for storage and to a treatment facility for reprocessing, with the aim to divert it from disposal of in landfill sites...

Today consumers demand fresh foods without additives, preservatives and health risks: that is why non-thermal food preservation methods are receiving more interest, among them High Pressure Processing is able to avoid thermal degradation of food components, extend their shelf life and preserve colour, flavour and nutritional value. HPP is often use...

Safety at the workplace is one of the most relevant issues for companies, due to the high number of accidents happening every year, some of which even deadly. Despite that, this number is decreasing thanks to continuous research and to an increasing application of safety procedures and devices. In line with that, the project presented in this work...

Agriculture and food manufacturing have a considerable effect on the environment emissions: holdings and farms play an important role about greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption. This study aims at evaluating the environmental impact of one of the most important Italian DOP product: organic Parmesan Cheese. Environmental performances of th...

The aim of this work is to compare the environmental impact of three different packaging systems for coffee capsules, which can be used in the same coffee machine. A comparative Life Cycle Assessment has been performed considering the following three types of coffee capsules: 1. Compostable coffee capsules packaged into a multichamber PET tray. 2....

The present paper builds upon the study by Bottani et al. (2018a). This previous work developed a routing and location (R&L) model under Microsoft Excel™ to compute the cost of the resulting reverse logistics channel. Exploiting the same R&L model, in the study developed by Bottani et al. (2018b), the authors investigated four different configurati...

The Wearable Augmented Reality for employee safety in Manufacturing systems (W-Artemys) project aims to create a new technological support to increase the employee safety during operations on machines. Within the framework of this project, this paper will show the development’s path of an easy-to-use software to enhance the operator’s safety, highl...

The so-called fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) we are facing at present let emerge powerful tools and new technologies; due to the high frequency of accidents that happen at the workplace related to these innovations, necessarily new devices are continuously developed to enhance the operators’ safety. Among these, we find the laser scann...

The aim of this article is to analyze and review the scientific literature relating to the application of Augmented Reality (AR) technology in industry. AR technology is becoming increasingly diffuse, due to the ease of application development and the widespread use of hardware devices (mainly smartphones and tablets) able to support its adoption....

The aim of this work is to evaluate the shelf life of cow's ricotta under MAP (Modified Atmosphere Packaging). MAP is a packaging technique commonly used in the food industry in order to control the microbial growth. After the extraction of the air present in the headspace of the package, a mixture of CO2, O2 and N2 in different percentage is usual...

The present paper builds upon the study by Bottani et al. (2018). This previous work developed a routing and location (R&L) model under Microsoft Excel™ to determine the best location of a set of depots to collect the wasted food from the retailers in the Emilia-Romagna region (Italy) and to compute the cost of the resulting reverse logistics chann...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework to select and implement an 'Industry 4.0' application into a manufacturing context, to enhance the safety of employees in carrying out troubleshooting tasks. After an overview of the main 'Industry 4.0' applications, a framework for the selection of the best application to enhance the operators' safety has...

This paper proposes a new metaheuristic routing algorithm for the minimization of the travel distance of pickers in manual warehouses. The algorithm is based on the ant colony optimization (ACO) metaheuristic, which is combined and integrated with the Floyd–Warshall (FW) algorithm, and is therefore referred to as FW–ACO. To assess the performance o...

This paper presents a routing and location (R&L) model able to help design an efficient reverse logistics channel for food waste, with particular attention to the waste generated at the retail stage of a food supply chain (FSC). The model, developed in Microsoft ExcelTM, is detailed along with its application in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy,...

Augmented reality (AR) systems help users perform tasks and operations in man–machine interaction, by adding virtual information (such as live-video streams, pictures or instructions) to the real-world environment. This paper describes the design and testing of an AR solution created to enhance the safety of employees when carrying out maintenance...

In Italy, most of the packaged food wasted during the distribution phase and at retail stores is disposed of in landfill, due to the absence of a sorting system able to separate food from packaging. A new experimental process, here presented, collects the packaged food waste from retailers, moves it to distribution centres, and then ships it to a s...

The aim of this study is to analyze, by means of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis, the injection of gaseous nitrogen (N2) in olive oil. This process, called sparging, is important to enhance oil shelf life, because it removes the oxygen (O2) dissolved in the product. In fact, when tank filling begins, N2 bubbles start to rise toward th...

The aim of this work is to evaluate the environmental impact of a spreadable cream based on Parmigiano Reggiano by means of the Life Cycle Assesment methodology (hereinafter referred to as LCA methodology), and to minimize its environmental impact through a sensitivity analysis. The considered product is a spreadable cream consisting of two ingredi...