Marco Bortolini

• University of Bologna

In the modern market scenario governed by the Mass Customization paradigm, the so-called delayed product differentiation (DPD) rose as a production strategy best balancing traditional Make-to-Stock (MTS) and Make-to-Order (MTO), potentially reducing storage cost and customization time. In industry, DPD uses product platforms, defined as a set of co...

Generation and transmission expansion planning (GEP and TEP) consists of finding the optimal long-term energy plan for the construction of new generation and transmission capacity. Typically, it deals with solving a large-scale, nonlinear discrete and dynamic optimization problem with complex constraints and a high level of uncertainty. The current...

The modern industry is facing the great challenge of meeting the changeable needs of the highly competitive global market, asking for an increasing variety of customized products. To manage the product variety, minimizing time to market and costs, companies started adopting a hybrid production strategy named delayed product differentiation (DPD) th...

Crowd logistics (CL) rose in the last years as an effective strategy to manage last-mile deliveries, especially in urban areas, which are often one of the main causes of the increased road traffic and, at the same time, negatively impacting on the environment. Within CL, the last-mile delivery is entrusted to the crowd, i.e. normal people willing t...

Ergonomics is a key factor in the improvement of health and productivity in workplaces. Its use in improving the performance of a manufacturing process and its positive effects on productivity and human performance is drawing the attention of researchers and practitioners in the field of industrial engineering. This paper proposes an ergonomic desi...

Within the framework of the industry 4.0, robotics plays a crucial role, leading to a widespread diffusion of Collaborative Robots (Cobots). Cobots can work alongside human operators, focusing on tasks with a high biomechanical risk. However, the design of workstations in which humans and cobots can perform tasks in collaboration poses new challeng...

The current production and market contexts are coping with the advent of the mass customization paradigm, in which customers ask for a high variety of differentiated products. To be competitive and survive in such a scenario, industrial companies need to identify the most suitable production strategy for their product families, balancing the minimi...

Global awareness of the need to decrease environmental impacts and the critical increase in the costs of traditional energy sources have motivated many countries to develop sustainable strategies based on the increasing use of renewables in their energy mix. Therefore, the way in which pathways towards a sustainable energy transition will be design...

The use of automation in flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing and assembly systems demands for tools and methodologies to manage human–machine collaboration, in terms of tasks’ optimization, performances and safety requirements. The study of automation in production cells and lines shall consider dynamic working environment and variable operat...

Over the last two decades Mass Customization (MC) paradigm rose as the main strategy to provide individually design product in a cost-efficient way. However, the increasing importance of sustainability in today’s world leads the companies to question about the environmental, economic and social impacts of their business model, hence influences and...

The modern industrial scenario is continuously requesting to supply chains and logistic networks to take complex decisions to deal with the recent global crises related to the supply of resources and environmental impacts. Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a paradigm that aims to valorise industrial by-products, redirecting them as inputs for other prod...

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) was introduced in 2011, and its advanced enablers strongly affect industrial practices. In the current literature, while several papers offer general reviews on the topic, contributions exploring the evidences coming from the implementation of I4.0 in multi‐sector Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises are few...

The delayed product differentiation (DPD) recently rose as a hybrid production strategy able to overcome the main limits of make to stock (MTS) and make to order (MTO), guaranteeing the management of high variety and keeping low storage cost and quick response time by using the so-called product platforms. These platforms are a set of sub-systems f...

In the recent years, the diversity in customer requirements asks industrial companies to move from mass production to mass customization, overcoming the traditional strategy of realizing a large volume of a single product in favor of the manufacturing of multiple product variants matching different customer needs. In such a scenario, traditional pr...

Globalization and rapid technological changes have led to increased customer requirements and an intensified competition. To remain cost-efficient, manufacturing companies move from traditional manufacturing systems towards flexible manufacturing systems. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems have proven to be an effective way of adapting to the rap...

Manufacturing companies are increasingly pressured by various market changes across both discrete manufacturing and process manufacturing industries. This has forced manufacturers to adopt more efficient product development approaches to deliver the required product variety in a cost-efficient manner. In discrete manufacturing industry, platform-ba...

The recognition of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies as enablers of Circular Economy (CE) is a debated topic throughout the last decade. Material flows and operations within circular cross-industry networks require information sharing platforms and supporting digital tools to improve resource optimisation and to aim at CE principles. As a branch of...

The pervasive digital innovation of the last decades has led to a remarkable transformation of maintenance strategies. The data collected from machinery and the extraction of valuable information through machine learning (ML) have assumed a crucial role. As a result, data-driven predictive maintenance (PdM) has received significant attention from a...

Extracting representative feature sets from raw signals is crucial in Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) for components’ behavior understanding. The literature proposes various methods, including signal processing in the time, frequency, and time–frequency domains, feature selection, and unsupervised feature learning. An emerging task in data...

Supply chain network design (SCND) is a pillar of supply chain management (SCM). The modern industrial and market context, characterized by instability and dynamism, asks the supply chains and logistic networks to be designed from an integrated and reactive perspective, addressing multiple goals. Economic and environmental sustainability is the mos...

Rotating machinery like pumps, compressors, and engines, are widespread in industries. A failure in one or more of their components, e.g., rolling bearings and gearboxes, may cause system breakdowns or even catastrophic events. Hence, fault diagnosis of rotating machinery is achieving great attention from both the industrial and academic fields. Af...

In the modern context governed by Industry 4.0, Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMSs) rose as an effective production strategy able to cope with the increased product variety, the dynamic market demand and the need for flexible production batches. The manufacturing environment is usually made of a set of intelligent machines, i.e. Reconfigura...

The ongoing fourth industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, was first introduced in 2011 at the Hannover Fair in Germany. Nowadays, such paradigm still represents a hot topic in the field of industrial engineering, with the aim to boot a radical transformation of the companies through the implementation of a set of new concepts and techno...

In the last decades, Seru Production Systems (SPSs) are introduced to face short product life cycle and high demand volatility, rising as a new cellular production pattern and a relevant alternative to lean systems. SPS is a particular class of cellular system in which the manufacturing cells are reconfigurable rather than fixed and they can be eff...

Given the strategic role that maintenance assumes in achieving profitability and competitiveness, many industries are dedicating many efforts and resources to improve their maintenance approaches. The concept of the Smart Factory and the possibility of highly connected plants enable the collection of massive data that allow equipment to be monitore...

Within the Assembly to Order (ATO) production strategy, the common approach is to produce the parts to assemble with a Push-Make to Stock policy.In recent decades, the effects of the modern Just in Time (JIT) moved to a Pull-Make to Order policy. Assembled parts characterized by wide variety and huge storage space utilization are critical, and a pr...

Prognostic Health Management (PHM) is a predictive maintenance strategy, which is based on Condition Monitoring (CM) data and aims to predict the future states of machinery. The existing literature reports the PHM at two levels: methodological and applicative. From the methodological point of view, there are many publications and standards of a PHM...

In this article, an experimental study of a wind turbine in a wind tunnel is performed. The objective has been to present a novel analytical computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based approach through considering the residual levels of the mass and momentum parameters under effect of different air flow characteristics surrounding the wind turbine, wh...

Featured Application The research study proposed in this paper provides valuable knowledge to support companies and industrial practitioners in the shift from traditional to advanced assembly systems in the new Industry 4.0 era matching current industrial and market features. Abstract Industry 4.0 emerged in the last decade as the fourth industria...

In the last decade, traditional industrial and market features were replaced by emerging factors, such as the variable market demand, the need for flexibility, the shorter product life cycles and the mass personalisation, which drastically modified the production environment, pressing industrial companies to embrace and implement new types of produ...

Smart assembly lines are a milestone of Industry 4.0 allowing the efficient and effective production of complex products with an acceptable time-to-market. According to the literature and the standard practice, these lines are made of a set of equipped stations with a worker for each of them. Products flow the stations in sequence to perform their...

The Walking Workers (WW) systems are interesting for their flexibility attributes, especially in terms of ability to manage the product variety and market demand. This paper aims to study the mixed model sequencing problem considering un-paced, unbuffered WW systems. The authors propose an original algorithm, called “accordion algorithm” for the mo...

In the last years, in industry, the adoption of effective microclimate strategies for the improvement of the indoor air quality (IAQ) has been considered an important topic for its effects on the workers' health and safety, but it is recently more relevant than ever in the light of the current coronavirus pandemic. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic...

In the last decades, Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMSs) rose as an emerging manufacturing strategy matching the modern industrial and market requirements asking for a wide variety of products in flexible batches. A traditional reconfigurable manufacturing environment consists of dynamic cells, called Reconfigurable Machine Cells (RMCs), in...

Non-traditional warehouses rise as effective solutions to shorten the travelled distances to store and retrieve unit loads, adding aisles crossing the parallel racks. Multiple warehouse configurations are proposed by the literature discussing the enhancements toward standard layouts. In previous contributions, the authors introduced the diagonal cr...

Purpose The kitting feeding policy creates kits with the parts of each product to assemble. Each kit contains elements with heterogeneous physical properties imposing heterogeneous logistic facilities and management solutions for storage and handling. The purpose of this paper is to present and apply a two-step procedure to design the part warehous...

In recent years, the adoption of reconfigurable systems represents a primary strategy to improving flexibility, elasticity and efficiency in both manufacturing and assembly. Despite their automation level, such systems still require actions by human operators, e.g. assembly/disassembly auxiliary custom modules. These operations rise safety and ergo...

This paper proposes a comparison of the handling performances of three non-conventional warehouses, i.e., Chevron, Diagonal Cross Aisle, and Fishbone, toward the traditional layout. A multi-scenario analysis is provided by using a tool developed in Visual Basic for Application environment. The goal is to compare the most relevant layouts, by using...

In the recent years, reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) emerged as a new class of manufacturing systems aiming to adapt the production capacity in a quick, efficient and cost-effective way, through a set of six core features, i.e. modularity, integrability, scalability, convertibility, customisation and diagnosibility. This paper focuses on...

Purpose – Industry 4.0 emerged as the Fourth Industrial Revolution aiming at achieving higher levels of operational efficiency, productivity and automation. In this context, manual assembly systems are still characterized by high flexibility and low productivity, if compared to fully automated systems. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to pro...

Nowadays, manufacturing environment is characterized by the necessity of customized flexibility as well as responding rapidly and cost-effectively to changing market demands while minimizing impacts on environment and society. To reach these goals, a key paradigm called sustainable manufacturing can be coupled with reconfigurable manufacturing syst...

This paper addresses the so calledintegrated process planning and scheduling (IPPS) problemin a reconfigurable manufacturing environment. Process planning and scheduling are two important and complex functions in manufacturing. To reduce the problem complexity, theyare considered sequentially by traditional approaches. In this paper, we consider th...

The dynamic market demand, the short product life cycles, the need for flexibility and the increased variety of customized products force industrial companies to explore the idea of moving towards new classes of manufacturing paradigms. Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMSs) meet such current challenges through the rapid change of their physic...

In the current industrial context, signed by the advent of Industry 4.0, traditional manufacturing systems are evolving towards the new class of Next Generation Manufacturing Systems (NGMSs), characterized by the main attributes of changeability, reconfigurability and self-adaptability. Such advanced systems are able to cope with the new industrial...

In the recent years, the adoption of reconfigurable systems represents a primary strategy to improving flexibility, elasticity and efficiency in both manufacturing and assembly. Global markets, the increasing need for customization, high-quality standards, dynamic batches and short life cycles are the key factors driving the transition from traditi...

Parts feeding is a complex logistic problem, stressed by the increasing product variety that forces the assembly systems to manage a great number of models with a mixed model approach. In this context a possible parts feeding policy is the “station-sequence”, sequences of parts supplied to the assembly stations as function of the production models....

This paper addresses the so-called integrated process planning and scheduling (IPPS) problem in a reconfigurable manufacturing environment. Process planning and scheduling are two important and complex functions in manufacturing. To reduce the problem complexity, they are considered sequentially by traditional approaches. In this paper, we consider...

Nowadays, manufacturing environment is characterized by the necessity of customized flexibility as well as responding rapidly and cost-effectively to changing market demands while minimizing impacts on environment and society. To reach these goals, a key paradigm called sustainable manufacturing can be coupled with reconfigurable manufacturing syst...

Wind is a clean source of energy which is spread over wide globe regions. This natural source of energy encourages the planners and stakeholders establishing investments towards installation of wind farms. Wind energy experts are looking through efficient alternatives for the best utilization of the wind energy. Design of wind farms is a fundamenta...

Within cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs), families of parts are assigned to manufacturing cells, composed by homogeneous sets of machines. In conventional CMSs, each cell is devoted to the production of a specific part family, reducing material handling and work-in-process. Despite their flexibility, such systems still suffer from coping with t...

Tobacco is among the top sectors, worldwide, for revenues and aggregate turnover with a global market arena and a group of top players progressively driving the change toward high-quality standards and a strong customer and environmental care. Behind cigarettes, the tobacco supply chain includes agricultural and industrial phases, to grow and cure...

Product platforms represent an effective strategy implemented by manufacturers to cope with dynamic market demands, decrease lead-time and delay products differentiation. A decision support system (DSS) for product platforms design and selection in high-variety manufacturing is presented. It applies median-joining phylogenetic networks (MJPN) for t...

Non-traditional warehouses shorten the travelled paths to store and retrieve (S/R) the loads, thanks to additional aisles crossing the parallel racks. This paper provides the analytic model to best design a non-traditional warehouse for unit-load (UL) with diagonal cross-aisles and storage policy according to the class-based storage (CBS) strategy....

Since 1913, the Harris’ model is adopted within intermittent production systems to size the batches to produce and purchase. For each product, the model sets the so-called Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) as the quantity optimally trading-off the cost of orders and the average stock cost. Traditionally, the EOQ from the Harris’ model is a milestone fo...

Smart and distributed energy micro-production is the new pattern for the electric energy supply, joining high service level and sustainability issues. Within such a context, the renewables, i.e. solar photovoltaic (PV), micro-wind, etc., play an increasing role as part of the source mix because of their capillary presence and the decrease of the re...

In modern business, industrial companies embrace lean philosophy to increase their efficiency moving toward the so-called continuous improvement of industrial processes. In parallel, according to the international regulations and stakeholder pressures, rising attention is toward sustainable environmental, i.e., green, practices. A relevant scientif...

In modern business, industrial companies embrace lean philosophy to increase their efficiency moving toward the so-called continuous improvement of industrial processes. In parallel, according to the international regulations and stakeholder pressures, rising attention is toward sustainable environmental, i.e., green, practices. A relevant scientif...

This research proposes an approach to design and to manage Cellular Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (CRMSs) from a multi-product and multi-period perspective. The production environment consists of multiple cells of machines equipped with Reconfigurable Machine Tools (RMTs) made of basic and auxiliary custom modules to perform specific tasks....

Nowadays, dynamic products life cycles and increase in the number of product variants have led to reduction in demand per variant. This modern trend is in contrast with the high production volume of manufacturing processes such as injection molding, since they are commonly employed for mass production due to their long changeover time. Traditional...

The management of the production and procurement of the assembled parts in an assembly to order (ATO) environment is a challenging problem. Due to the high variety and high inventory space utilization of the sheet metal plate parts, many companies choose to include in their production the cutting, blending, welding and if necessary, painting proces...

Mixed-model Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMSs) and, more recently, Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMSs) are widely studied as diffuse solutions for complex production environments, targeting variable markets and highly dynamic production plans. Their design and management are challenging both in new plants and for plant-redesign actions....

The maintenance of complex production systems became increasingly crucial to ensure the competitiveness of companies and service level to their clients. Because of product customization the number of mechanical and electrical components and functional groups of manufacturing lines enhanced with their complexity. To face this concern, the physical a...

Industrial machines usually experience considerable energy consumption and alternate production rates, as function of the market demand. These machines are typically equipped with electrical motors used to power the tools required for the manufacturing processes. Large mismatches between the changing production rates and the effective motor speeds...

This paper aims to present a methodology and multi-scenario application for the techno-economic assessment of the wind turbine layout in a wind farm. The considered decisional variables deal with the number of wind turbines to install, their self-distance and their distance toward the primary grid line. In addition, the wind speed profile and the s...

The current manufacturing environment aims at getting an increasing variety of customised, high-quality products in flexible batches. The dynamic market demand, the short product lifecycle and the flexibility need mark the transition from the traditional manufacturing systems to the so-called Next Generation Manufacturing Systems (NGMSs). Reconfigu...

Nowadays the Smart Factories operating within the Industry 4.0 revolution, require more and more reliable, fast and automatic tools for production analysis and improvement. Manufacturing companies, in which the human labour has a crucial role, need instruments able to manage complex production systems in terms of resource utilization, product mix,...

The current research aims to present an inclusive review of latest research works performed with the aim of improving the efficiency of the hybrid renewable energy systems (HRESs) by employing diverse ranges of the optimization techniques, which aid the designers to achieve the minimum expected total cost, while satisfying the power demand and the...

The impact of packaging waste on the environment is becoming unsustainable, which has necessitated a turning point in material recycling and reuse. Such a concept is highly relevant in the humanitarian supply chain due to the huge mass of packaging items that are provided to countries hit by disasters, with these bad conditions making it almost imp...

Packaging is crucial in protecting and handling products through the stages of their logistic networks. Actually, both disposable and reusable packaging containers are used. The former ends its life at the last stage of the distribution chain, the latter requires reverse flows to collect, recondition and, then, reuse it. Costs and emissions associa...

The cost of quality represents a relevant item in total manufacturing costs. The learning process is incorporated into contemporary models because of its impact on unitary production costs through both autonomous (learning by doing) and induced (learning by means of proactive actions) learning processes. A learning model with time-varying learning...

The cost of quality represents a relevant item in total manufacturing costs. The learning process is incorporated into contemporary models because of its impact on unitary production costs through both autonomous (learning by doing) and induced (learning by means of proactive actions) learning processes. A learning model with time-varying learning...

Safeguard the operator health is nowadays a hot topic for most of the companies whose production process relies on manual manufacturing and assembly activities. European legislations, national regulations and international standards force the companies to assess the risk of musculoskeletal disorders of operators while they are performing manual tas...

The handling activities within mixed-model assembly systems deal with two different logistic levels of the production environment. The micro-logistic level includes movements of parts across each assembly station due to pick to assembly activities. The macro-logistic level includes movements of parts within the supermarket and to deliver the stock-...

Starting from the definition of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm, this paper discusses goals and strategies for the design and building of an IoT architecture aiding the planning, management and control of the Food Supply Chain (FSC) operations. A comprehensive architecture of the entities, the physical-objects, the physical and informative fl...

Efforts to decrease the water use within industry are mandatory to pursue product and process sustainability. Particularly, the European Union (EU) is at the top level for water consumption in industry, while some sectors, such as the food and beverage (F&B), are highly water-intensive with hundreds of liters per hour of consumed and, then, drained...

Lean Management (LM) is a production philosophy attracting a wider number of industries worldwide. Its purpose is to increase productivity and efficiency and to reduce wastes and muda's. In parallel, great attention rises toward Green Management (GM) and environmental sustainability, minimising emissions and the carbon footprint of the industrial a...

Warehouse building design tackles the industrial issue of best studying the overall configuration and dimensions of the storage systems reaching one or more predefined target of performance. This paper proposes a multi-objective model for the warehouse building design to minimize the cycle time, the total cost, and the carbon footprint of the stora...

Assembly system design defines proper configurations and efficient management strategies to maximize the assembly system performances. Beyond assembly line balancing and scheduling, several other dimensions of this problem have to be considered. Furthermore, the assembly system design has to consider the industrial environment in which the system o...

Population growth and rising per capita consumption of meat is growing and is expected to further accelerate in future. The production of beef is undoubtedly an high environmental stressor due to land-use change, water and energy consumption and by-products production. This paper focuses on the distribution and transportation processes of the beef...

The food & beverage (F&B) industry is among the most water intensive sectors with thousands of litres per hour of raw water requirement. Starting from the statement of this issue, an overview of the evidences from the field and a quick survey of the existing technologies for the raw water saving through its local collection and treatment before dis...

This investigation evaluated the quality changes of commercial vegetable oils after different simulated shipments. In particular, the oils were placed in containers with or without thermal insulation and subjected to two simulated shipments, from Italy to Los Angeles and to Quebec. The temperature profiles were monitored to simulate the real shipme...

The distribution and storage efficiency together with the environmental sustainability are mandatory targets to consider when designing and managing modern supply chain (SC) networks. The current literature continuously looks for quantitative multi-perspective strategies and models, including and best balancing such issues that often diverge. This...

Assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) purpose is to assign assembly tasks to workstations optimizing a certain objective function. Despite this problem has been studied for decades, few contributions consider material exposure and part characteristics in ALBP. Furthermore, these features have relevant and practical implications for ALBP in the ind...

This chapter presents an experimental analysis about the retrofitting of two commercial stationary refrigeration systems marketed by an Italian leading company of the sector. Such systems operate both at medium temperature (MT) and low temperature (LT) and they are originally designed to work with the high global warming potential (GWP) hydrofluoro...

Effectiveness in warehouse design and operations is crucial for the industrial companies to be competitive in the market arena by reducing the response time and inbound costs, increasing their global service level. Storage assignment deals with the definition of effective strategies to organise items into industrial warehouses to achieve high perfo...