Rita Gamberini

Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia | UNIMO · Department of Engineering Sciences and Methods

The increasing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and the corresponding surge in lithium-ion battery (LIB) production have intensified the focus on sustainable end-of-life (EOL) management strategies (i.e., reuse, repurpose, remanufacture, and recycle). This paper presents a systematic literature review of the entire remanufacturing process of LIB...

The growing demand for electric vehicles necessitates an efficient and sustainable life-cycle management of lithium-ion batteries. This work examines existent literature on digital battery passports, crucial for high-quality data for decision-making purposes, and distributed ledger technologies as transparent and efficient enablers. An hybrid BWM-T...

The growing demand for electric vehicles exacerbates concerns over the environmental implications of lithium-ion battery waste, which poses risks to both ecological systems and public health. While remanufacturing has been acknowledged as a viable, sustainable pathway for mitigating these issues, existing literature lacks a comprehensive investigat...

Paper "Enhancing Waste-to-Energy and Hydrogen Production through Urban–Industrial Symbiosis: A Multi-Objective Optimisation Model Incorporating a Bayesian Best-Worst Method" selected as the issue cover.

Purpose This study presents the development of a supply chain (SC) observatory, which is a benchmarking solution to support companies within the same industry in understanding their positioning in terms of SC performance. Design/methodology/approach A case study is used to demonstrate the set-up of the observatory. Twelve experts on automatic equi...

The management and improvement of air quality are global challenges aimed at protecting human health and environmental resources. For this purpose, in addition to legislative and scientific indications, numerous tools are available: measurement methods and tools for estimating and forecasting. As a collection of data presenting an emission of a pol...

A surging demand for sustainable energy and the urgency to lower greenhouse gas emissions is driving industrial systems towards more eco-friendly and cost-effective models. Biogas from agricultural and municipal organic waste is gaining momentum as a renewable energy source. Concurrently, the European Hydrogen Strategy focuses on green hydrogen for...

In modern production systems, prioritizing the safety and well-being of human operator is crucial. Industry 5.0 responds to this need by giving significant importance to the Human Factor (HF) and ergonomics. Our work introduces a semi-automatic tool for Compositive Lifting Index (CLI) calculation for risk detection during multi-task manual lift job...

The growing demand for sustainable energy sources and the need to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions have led to increased interest in developing efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly industrial systems. This paper presents a multi-echelon multi-objective network design model for urban-industrial symbiosis, combining biogas and hyd...

People spend approximately 90% of their day in confined spaces (at home, work, school or in transit). During these periods, exposure to high concentrations of atmospheric pollutants can pose serious health risks, particularly to the respiratory system. The objective of this paper is to define a framework of the existing literature on the assessment...

Policymakers and entrepreneurs are aware that reducing energy waste and underutilization are mandatory to actually foster the green transition. Nevertheless, small–medium enterprises usually meet technical and overwhelming financial constraints. They are unable to make profits, become less energy-sensitive, and cut down on their emissions simultane...

In recent years, the addition of plastic and rubber waste to construction materials has been widely studied by the research community. This great interest can mainly be attributed to the achievable potential environmental and economic benefits, mainly deriving from the reduction of incinerated or landfilled wastes and the decrease of used raw mater...

Transportation is essential for economic and social development, and vehicle flow data can be used for safety monitoring, pollution analysis, and traffic flow management. Unfortunately, traffic management and control centres do not always comply with codified standards, making it difficult to obtain up-to-date data. This paper analyses open traffic...

Recently, a new Industrial Revolution has been conceptualized, this is coined with the term “Industry 5.0”. In fact, the rapid development of information and operational technologies enabled the creation of a new human-centric industrial paradigm. In this paper, we collect the necessities to go beyond Industry 4.0, the key technologies enabling Ind...

Air pollution is a major risk factor, and it still remains a global cause of death for millions of people. Indoor air quality (IAQ) plays an important role in human health as people spend most of their time in confined spaces. Many studies have recently addressed this issue, but no systematic analysis has been conducted, which is the aim of our stu...

Forced by environmental implications and by legislation requirements, the cement sector is moving towards more circular economy practices, with the primary aim to enhance the sector sustainability. This commitment translates into product technology innovation, but also into innovative development perspectives for the industries involved in the supp...

Buildings have a central role to play in the energy transition driven by the European Commission with the introduction of the nearly zero-energy buildings notion for both new constructions and existing building stocks. Despite the growing interest in improving the energy performance of residential as well as office buildings, a research gap is iden...

Globally, tourism is currently one of the fastest-growing industries, with strong impacts on territories, from an environmental, economic and social point of view. The increase in the number of tourists who flock to destinations requires greater attention to sustainability through tools (indicators) such as strategic destination management support....

The recently developing coffee market has been characterized by profound changes caused by new solutions and technologies for coffee preparation. The polylaminate materials that compose most popular capsules make them a type of waste that is difficult to manage and recycle. This paper analyses the scientific references that deal with studying and i...

In recent times, the construction industry has been handling circular economy strategies in order to face the most important challenges in the sector, namely the lack of raw materials and the environmental impacts derived from all the processes linked to the entire supply chain. The industrial symbiosis approach represents an effective strategy to...

Marine litter, with millions of tons discharged per year, is a recognized global environmental problem that affects the natural environment and living organisms. They are solid materials that end up in the environment from a plurality of sources present on land or on water. These materials float on the water surface or column and settle on the seab...

The best public sector performance has long been a topic at the core of political, social and economic debate. Public management policies and the growing adoption of corporate governance principles support the transition towards models capable of guaranteeing greater control of results in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and outcome. Healthcare...

The health emergency linked to the spread of COVID‐19 has led to important reduction in industrial and logistics activities, as well as to a drastic changes in citizens' behaviors and habits. The restrictions on working activities, journeys and relationships imposed by the lockdown have had important consequences, including for environmental qualit...

Life Cycle Assessment quantifies the multi-dimensional impact of goods and services and can be handled by Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. In Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Robust Ordinal Regression manages all the compatible preference functions at once when assessing a set of alternatives and a group of preferences on reference alternatives....

The global demand for electrical and electronic equipment has undergone continuous growth in recent years due to the effect of industrialization and technological development. This indicates substantial quantities of e-waste that need to be managed properly to reduce their environmental impact and to avoid inappropriate forms of disposal. The purpo...

The global demand for electrical and electronic equipment has undergone continuous growth in recent years due to the effect of industrialization and technological development. This indicates substantial quantities of e-waste that need to be managed properly to reduce their environmental impact and to avoid inappropriate forms of disposal. The purpo...

Global markets and the concept of innovation require modern companies to quickly adapt to two very relevant paradigms: digital innovation and open innovation. Therefore, the use of digital technologies and the development of open collaboration networks have radically changed the nature of the organisation of innovation and of the managerial approac...

An increasing freight demand is putting pressure on the freight transport network, forced to pay high costs to ensure compliance with the conditions and delivery times, as well as to grow towards environmental sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the main drivers for choosing the type of transport in the planning of distribution...

The COVID-19 health emergency has imposed the need to limit and/or stop non-essential economic and commercial activities and movement of people. The objective of this work is to report an assessment of the change in vehicle flows and in air quality of a specific study area in the north of Italy, comparing the periods February–May 2020 and February–...

Despite the growing interest in the field of urban-industrial symbiosis as well as in sustainable energy solutions at city level, a research gap is recognized in terms of analyzing the advantages of energy symbiosis networks between industrial and urban areas integrating renewable energy systems. The urban-industrial symbiosis can support both urb...

Plastic materials account for about 20% of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). The recycling of this plastic fraction is a complex issue, heavily conditioned by the content of harmful additives, such as brominated flame retardants. Thus, the management and reprocessing of WEEE plastics pose environmental and human health concerns, mai...

Air quality is a widespread problem with the presence of pollutants in indoor and outdoor environments that generate significant consequences for the population, ecosystems and exposed materials. Vehicular traffic is one of the main sources of air pollutants and, therefore, needs to be studied and analysed in detail. This review reported the result...

Digitization, dematerialization, technological innovation are some of the elements that characterize the levers for being competitive on modern markets. The European and Italian entrepreneurial fabric, strongly characterized by micro and small enterprises and craft businesses, still requires great efforts to make the best use of the enabling techno...

In order to evaluate the environmental benefits of energy industrial symbiosis networks with the inclusion of renewable technologies, a model that minimises greenhouse gases emissions has been developed. A validation of the model has been carried out comparing the results with those calculated with a life cycle assessment of a reference case. The s...

This data article reports supplementary input and output data related to the research article “Environmental performance analysis of a dual-source heat pump system” on the life cycle assessment evaluation of an heat pump prototype, able to use alternatively the air and the ground as external heat sources. Primarily, the present article shows the li...

The Special Issue aims to provide a cross-disciplinary debate focusing on technical, economic, organizational, regulatory, environmental, and social drivers and barriers of the energy symbiosis approach, including but not limited to the following topics: -Modelling industrial and urban-industrial energy symbiosis, including renewable energy sources...

In order to evaluate the environmental benefits of energy industrial symbiosis networks with the inclusion of renewable technologies, a model that minimises greenhouse gases emissions has been developed. A validation of the model has been carried out comparing the results with those calculated with a life cycle assessment of a reference case. The s...

Options to reduce industry GHG emissions. • Review and analysis of energy symbiosis schemes including renewable energy sources. • Energy strategy within eco-industrial parks to promote the use of renewable energy sources. • Urban-industrial energy symbiosis including renewable energy sources. Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources is...

The continuous research of alternative and sustainable energy solutions with respect to fuels deriving from oil has led the current industrial and scientific system to analyze and develop approaches and technologies capable of enhancing materials of different nature for the production of biofuels. Algae are an alternative widely studied for this pu...

Trillions of cigarettes are smoked annually making cigarette butts one of the most common types of litter in the world. Due to the materials and toxic substances that they contain, this waste carries a very harmful risk for the environment and for living organisms (including humans). Only a few - barely sustainable - solutions have tried to tackle...

The European Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment system introduced measures to encourage both the reduction of the amount of electronic waste and its separation to prepare for reuse. The aim of this study is compare the environmental performance, cost externality and job creation of the whole life cycle of new and reconditioned electrical and...

The training of suppliers and inbound quality inspectors is a common strategy to increase the quality performance of the supply chain but, under budget constraints, these actors compete for a limited amount of training hours. The proposed model aims to allocate the available training hours so as to minimise a total quality cost function composed of...

Perishable items with a limited lifespan and intermittent/erratic consumption are found in a variety of industrial settings: dealing with such items is challenging for inventory managers. In this study, a periodic inventory control system is analysed, in which items are characterised by intermittent demand and known expiration dates. We propose a n...

Multi-criteria inventory classification groups inventory items into classes, each of which is managed by a specific re-order policy according to its priority. However, the tasks of inventory classification and control are not carried out jointly if the classification criteria and the classification approach are not robustly established from an inve...

Today, almost everybody has a smartphone and applications have been developed to help users to take decisions (e.g. which hotel to choose, which museum to visit, etc). In order to improve the recommendations of the mobile application, it is crucial to elicit the preference structures of the user. As problems are often based on several criteria, mul...

A series of random poly(butylene succinate)-based copolymers, (poly(butylene/triethylene succinate) (P(BSmTESn)), containing ether-oxygen atoms were successfully synthesized by melt polycondensation of succinic acid and 1,4-butanediol in the presence of triethylene glycol (TEG) (TEG content up to 40 mol%). The copolymers were characterized from the...

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...

Inventory control is one of the main activities in industrial plant management. Both process owners and line workers interact daily with stocks of components and finite products, and an effective management of these inventory levels is a key factor in an efficient manufacturing process. In this paper the algorithms k-means and Ward's method are use...

A case study on continuous process control based on fuzzy logic and supported by expert knowledge is proposed. The aim is to control the coal-grinding operations in a cement manufacturing plant. Fuzzy logic is based on linguistic variables that emulate human judgment and can solve complex modeling problems subject to uncertainty or incomplete infor...

The problem of studying a plant layout is frequently tackled in literature. Nevertheless, approaches specifically dedicated to predefined market fields are rare. Usually, methodologies available for a wide variety of companies are studied and adopted, disregarding those details typical of each economical sector. On the contrary, in this paper, cust...

The Assembly Line Balancing Problem (ALBP) represents one of the most explored research topics in manufacturing. However, only a few contributions have investigated the effect of the combined abilities of humans and machines in order to reach a balancing solution. It is well-recognized that human beings learn to perform assembly tasks over time, wi...

OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is a widely used indicator in the evaluation of effectiveness of manufacturing systems. However, several authors published alternative approaches for its computation, complicating the implementation step for practitioners. This study analyses the literature regarding OEE, selects four main methodologies for its...

A multi-criteria inventory classification (MCIC) approach based on supervised classifiers (i.e. decision trees and random forests) is proposed, whose training is performed on a sample of items that has been previously classified by exhaustively simulating a predefined inventory control system. The goal is to classify automatically the whole set of...

Several papers have studied inventory classification in order to group items with a view to facilitating their management. The generated classes are then coupled with the specific reorder policies composing the overall inventory control system. However, the effectiveness of inventory classification and control system is strictly interrelated. That...

One of the major shortcomings of traditional failure modes, effects and criticality analysis is the absence of any interconnection between failure ranking and a procedure for selecting the most critical maintenance/improvement tasks to be carried out. This limits the potential of FMECA for implementation in real environments. In order to bridge thi...

Perishable items, with a limited lifespan and a known expiration date, are found in a variety of industrial settings. From the food to the pharmaceutical industries, the supply chains specialize their inventory control systems to handle the added complexity. These efforts are enhanced when the items present also an intermittent consumption, charact...

The present article describes the application of a poly(ethylene terephthalate) mesh as template for the preparation of micro-structured fibres mat by electrospinning of biodegradable triblock copolymers based on polylactic acid and poly(butylene succinate/azelate) random copolymer. These copolymers present and excellent controlled biodegradation p...

Multi-criteria decision making represents an extended branch of decision sciences which is highly applicable to several real settings. In particular, the question of ranking has attracted wide attention from researchers in the last few decades, through approaches based on different multi-criteria methods. However, ranking alternatives does not solv...

Managing intermittent demand is a vital task in several industrial contexts, and good forecasting ability is a fundamental prerequisite for an efficient inventory control system in stochastic environments. In recent years, research has been conducted on single-hidden layer feedforward neural networks, with promising results. In particular, back-pro...

In the building sector today, enamelled steel products are largely used because of their longevity and aesthetic qualities. In recent years, the considerable improvement in the chemical frit composition for enamelling has led to the development of TiO2 nanoparticle functionalized coatings. Thanks to the photo-catalytic and super-hydrophilic propert...

Defining a dynamic model for calculating production cost is a challenging goal that requires a good fitting ability with real data over time. A novel cost curve is proposed here with the aim of incorporating both the learning and the forgetting phenomenon during both the production phases and the reworking operations. A single-product cost model is...

Waste management in Europe is shaped by the waste hierarchy, which guides the legislation and policy of the Member States. This hierarchy applies the following order of priority: (1) prevention; (2) preparing for reuse; (3) recycling; (4) other recovery; (5) disposal. The wide acceptance of this principle in Europe comes from a yearly developed pat...

Most of the developing countries are facing great challenges to manage the increasing quantity of waste produced in the urban areas, that are growing at a very high rate. This paper presents the preliminary results of a technical study aiming at designing the first municipal master plan for the management of urban solid waste in the capital city of...

Introduction: The growing amount of waste derived from electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) poses significant challenges to waste management, due to the presence of toxic chemicals with environmental and health implications for the general population and for occupationally-exposed workers. Methods: Based on an toxicological and epidemiologic...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a modified failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) in order to make the assignment of the scores for the occurrence factor more robust, and to link the FMEA chart directly to the maintenance activities. Design/methodology/approach – A well-known clustering algorithm (i.e. K-means), along with a nor...

Most complex decisions involve several stakeholders and therefore need to be solved using a group multi-criteria decision method. However, stakeholders or decision-makers often have divergent views, especially in the environmental sector. In order to integrate this divergence, a new group fuzzy PROMETHEE approach is introduced to combine the tradit...

This contribution aims to provide an overview on the use of poly(butylene succinate) (PBS) and its copolymers in biomedicine, with particular attention to emerging topics, such as controlled drug release and tissue engineering. Indeed, PBS is a well-known aliphatic polyester, given its interesting thermo-mechanical properties and the proven biodegr...

Novel fully bio-based poly(lactic acid) copoly(ester-urethane)s have been successfully synthesized. The new system is composed of a series of A-B-A triblock copolymers, where A, hard block, is poly(lactic acid) and B, soft block, is an ad hoc designed random aliphatic copolyester, poly(butylene succinate/azelate), characterized by high flexibility....

In line with the continuous improvement theory, the learning phenomenon is often incorporated into models for predicting the evolution of the unitary quality costs. In this paper, the quality metric predicted is the rate of supplied non-conforming units through a learning process with autonomous and induced sources of experience. The former is simp...

By the combination of prepolymers with very different physical/chemical properties, better performance materials can be obtained. In the present study, three hydroxyl-terminated fully aliphatic polyesters have been chain extended to prepare new multiblock poly(ester urethane)s (PEU) displaying thermoplastic elastomeric characteristics. Poly(butylen...