Simone Zanoni

• Ph.D
• Professor (Full) at University of Brescia

Growing awareness of the environmental impact of radiology departments highlights the importance of adopting mitigation strategies to increase the energy sustainability of diagnostic activities. This study aims to estimate the energy usage of imaging activities in a radiology department to plan and evaluate different energy waste mitigation strateg...

The healthcare sector is responsible for around 4.4 % of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, according to estimates. Operating rooms are responsible for the greatest rate of resource consumption and overall hospital waste, varying from 20 % to 33 %. Hence, it is essential to fully discover the environmental impact of surgical procedures to obtain i...

Since 2022, sustainability has taken on a new technical, economic, and social relevance given the challenges introduced by the Sustainable Development Goals, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war on the energy sector. A huge and still growing number of sustainability evaluation models and frameworks have been developed to support conscious environment...

In the context of enhanced decision making related to Industry 4.0 and 5.0, this work examines the first step toward the implementation of a Digital Twin (DT) in a discrete manufacturing firm. It will be required that the DT be adequately integrated with the information systems, especially the Manufacturing Execution System (MES), because the virtu...

In the context of enhanced decision-making related to Industry 4.0 and 5.0, this work examines the first step to implement a Digital Twin (DT) in a discrete manufacturing firm. The DT will be required to be adequately integrated with the information systems, especially the Manufacturing Execution System (MES), because the virtual counterpart of the...

The increasing focus on environmental sustainability is becoming essential in the radiology sector, which is accredited for about 10 % of the healthcare industry’s carbon footprint. A multitude of research initiatives investigated the environmental impacts of diagnostic imaging. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) stands as a prominent method for structura...

The increasing focus on environmental sustainability is becoming essential in the diagnostic imaging sector, which is accredited for about 10% of the healthcare industry’s carbon footprint. A multitude of research initiatives investigated the environmental impacts of diagnostic imaging, encompassing factors like electricity consumption, carbon emis...

The healthcare sector is responsible for around 4.4% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, according to estimates. These emissions comprise both direct and indirect sources, with direct emissions encompassing aspects like patient transport, fuel consumption, and anaesthetic gases. Indirect emissions are associated with energy usage, including elec...

Great dynamism and uncertainty characterize today's market situation, increasing the supply chain's complexity. This imposes the improvement of the classical production control systems. The present production environment is challenging, as traditional manufacturing planning and control systems were not developed to work in this context. The Demand...

The increase in energy costs has led researchers and practitioners to investigate the energy consumption of buildings and propose solutions for its improvement. This research aimed at estimating the effect of different temperature control strategies on the energy consumption of a building. This study belongs to the field of research that considers...

Food refrigeration during transport, and storage activities makes energy consumption in the supply chain particularly high, with relevant impacts on its sustainability. The growing push towards sustainability and product quality makes it necessary to have a continuous temperature control that allows to avoid food waste and temperature abuses with u...

This study presents an extension of the model proposed by Huang et al. (2020), which investigated the effects of carbon policies and green technologies on the integrated inventory management of a two-echelon supply chain with consideration of carbon emissions during the processes of product production, transportation, and storage. Specifically, sin...

The quality of human nutrition has acquired significant improvements thanks to the opportunity to store food in suitable temperature conditions. Refrigeration has allowed the slowing of chemical and biological degradation and hence the waste of foodstuff, but at the same time increases energy consumption. These effects impact the environment and th...

Energy systems are experiencing a growth of distributed generation from Renewable Energy Sources (RES) thanks to their contribution to the transition towards sustainable systems. The adoption of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BEESs) represents a key-enabling technology to increase the penetration of RESs, as they can mitigate their main drawbacks...

Perishable goods, such as chilled and frozen foods, have a short shelf life and high sensitivity to their surrounding environment (e.g., temperature, humidity, and light intensity). For this reason, they must be distributed within a specific time and require special equipment and facilities (e.g., refrigeration and dehumidification systems) through...

Ameliorating and deteriorating products, or, more generally, items that change value over time, present a high sensitiveness to the surrounding environment (e.g., temperature, humidity, and light intensity). For this reason, they should be properly stored along the supply chain to guarantee the desired quality to the consumers. Specifically, amelio...

Cold supply chains of food and beverage sectors represent one of the main drivers of the EU total final energy consumption. Within this context, food quality losses, changes in temperature regimes, energy use, environmental burdens, and the economic viability of energy efficiency measures are essential aspects to consider for improving cold supply...

A consignment stock (CS) policy is a promising supply chain coordination mechanism. Delay-in-payments is a financing arrangement that facilitates purchases and increases sales by postposing a payment to some future time. It lowers costs and increases profitability, somewhat like what CS does. A study in the literature shows that combing the two rea...

The increasing attention to the critical environmental situation leads towards the greater diffusion of vehicles based on affordable and clean energy, like electric energy. The electrification of traction thus favours the development of sustainable cities. This also applies to the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), for which the electric solution in...

Circular economy and industrial symbiosis represent a production and consumption model involving sharing, lending, reusing, and recycling existing materials and products in the most efficient way to increase sustainability and reduce or eliminate waste. Beef production has a high impact on the environment in different impact categories, especially...

The design of the propulsion system for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) demands an inclusive multidisciplinary approach from the earliest design phases, since every design choice strictly affects and is affected by the overall working conditions. This paper presents a review of the scientific literature focused on the design methods applied in defi...

Lighting influences both private and working life. At the same time, it is a critical contributor to energy consumption. Despite the various technical solutions for making lighting “smart,” today’s lighting systems are often kept simple, and they are frequently not adjusted to user behaviors. This is especially the case for production and logistics...

Perishable foodstuffs present a limited shelf life and a high sensitivity to the ambient temperature. To slow deterioration and to deliver safe and high-quality products to consumers, their processing and distribution from farm to fork should occur within a specified time in a chilled or frozen state. Food refrigeration has a significant impact on...

The rapid expansion of emerging markets, combined with the influence of hedge funds and market speculators, highly increased commodity prices. At the same time, the global economic recession and an adverse credit environment, caused the price of commodities to drop with alarming speed. This huge volatility in prices generates a significant commodit...

Supply chain finance has been gaining attention in theory and practice. A company’s financial position affects its performance and survivability in dynamic and volatile markets. Those that have weak financial performance are vulnerable when operating in environments that are uncertain and financially unstable. Companies adopt various solutions and...

Cold supply chains (CSCs) are responsible for preserving the quality of perishable goods in storage and transport. They consume significant amounts of energy to maintain cooling temperatures constant over time continuously and ubiquitously, which is affected by the surrounding environment and the users’ behavior. The storage filling level is one sp...

Electrical energy storage systems gathered a large interest among the energy market, since they have a key role in increasing the hosting capacity of renewables overcoming their main drawbacks (i.e. intermittency and uncertainty of the power generation). They also lead to increased share of self-consumption and improved reliability of the electric...

Nowadays, energy efficiency is a crucial factor for the competitiveness of manufacturing firms, due to the rising of world energy prices and as a consequence of the environmental consciousness concerned with the consumption of non-renewable energy resources. The furnaces for steel reheating are responsible for a large amount of energy consumption,...

The term “energy efficiency” covers a wide scope and it is affected by a lack of clarity. To overcome this issue, quantitative measures should be defined and evaluated for each unit of product or process considered. These quantitative indicators are necessary to support and evaluate energy efficiency improvements in industry, by allowing to (i) mon...

Stakeholders’ interests on renewable and clean energy sources experienced a huge increase in the last decades, thanks to the remarkable benefits on climate, economic, and social issues. The integration of flexible energy storage systems represents a great chance for a further increased penetration as they support the mitigation of renewables’ main...

The increased awareness on sustainability, along with several governments’ actions for setting greenhouse gas restrictions, has recently generated a relevant pressure on industries towards the improvement of environmental performances. Among the several aspects, companies’ focus is mainly on energy use, firstly for its relevant and direct impact on...

The rapid transition of energy markets from centralized to distributed models entails several challenges, such as the management of bi-directional energy flows and complex transactions, increased volatility, exponential growth of the number of players and of data volume, legacy issues for players , cyber security and data privacy. Direct peer-to-pe...

To carry out a comprehensive analysis of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, two major aspects need to be considered. Firstly, identification of AM’s capabilities in manufacturing final products in industry requires an accurate evaluation of their impacts across all supply chain stages. Secondly, making products additively entails potential c...

Environmental issues, mainly greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, are in large part the result of the excessive use of energy in production systems. The scarcity of resources, governmental regulations, and public awareness about sustainability make them expensive for companies. The speed of producing items (production rate) impacts GHG emissions generat...

The economic order quantity model and its variants are the oldest reported scientific inventory models in the literature. They are mathematically simple to use and understand. This characteristic contributed to their popularity. However, they have limitations that restrict their application in practice. Researchers have extended those models by rel...

Learning has become essential for many companies whose manufacturing environment, where tasks have increased in complexity, requires a workforce of specific skills. Training of workers and learning-by-doing reduce the unit cost as the production rate speeds and improve product and process quality. Better quality means less rework and machine downti...

The demand of food distribution across global supply chains is continuously growing and since this kind of deliveries need refrigeration, the growth will enormously increase the energy request and the associated carbon emissions. The aim of this study is to develop a model for the optimisation of eco-efficiency related to a typical refrigerated foo...

The progressive paradigm shift from the centralized generation of electricity towards decarbonized and distributed energy systems is deeply changing the way energy is produced, distributed, and consumed. A relevant attention is currently being paid to the development of innovative control strategies for the management of the increasing complexity o...

Electric Vehicles (EVs) seem to represent a promising solution for the replacement of traditional internal combustion engines due to the growing concerns on the pollution in urban environments. However, their wide diffusion is expected to cause relevant issues for the operation of existing power grids. The proper management of EVs charging stations...

The industrial sector is the most energy-demanding activity in modern societies, consuming about 54 % of the world's total delivered energy. The largest amount of waste heat in the industry sector is generated by energy-intensive processes, such as the manufacturing of food, paper, basic metals (e.g. iron and steel), chemicals, and non-metallic min...

Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry is today strongly related to technologies for the gathering, storing and mining of big data. The use of data is paramount in today management and design is also interpreting this dictat as a new and crucial paradigm. A building is no longer a static body of material but a dynamic flow of dat...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) enrichment in controlled environmental conditions has proved to enhance the growth and production of a wide variety of crops. Previous studies suggested that the use of this horticulture practice in greenhouses may represent a useful opportunity for the capture and utilization of industrial CO2 emissions. The symbiosis among in...

Attention to energy efficiency is recently experiencing substantial growth. To overcome the several barriers currently existing that represent an obstacle to the successful implementation of the wide set of energy efficiency measures available, the cooperation among members of a supply chain offers a huge potential. In supply chains, in addition to...

In recent years the introduction of virtual simulation allowed to improve the management of major incidents by developing tools (or serious games) able to increase awareness of coordination and decision-making abilities in emergency situations. This study presents the results of a new serious game that simulates activities, procedures and processes...

This paper considers a learning curve where the production/assembly process may go out of control producing defective items that require reworking. This paper revisits the quality learning curve of Jaber and Guiffrida (2008) by assuming the restoration time to follow a learning curve and that the probability of the process going out of control redu...

Environmentally responsible actions can play a strategic role in protecting and enhancing the image of a supply chain. The production rate of manufacturing activities is a driver that affects environmental performance the most. It becomes faster with learning, which results in generating more CO2 emissions. In this contribution, a vendor-buyer gree...

This paper presents a model for the evaluation of the environmental impacts associated with the management of cold supply chain, considering transport and storage activities. A novel portable refrigerated unit (PRU) for the management of goods along the cold chain is presented, and its performances, in terms of emissions at different distribution s...

Energy efficiency represents a key resource for economic and social development, providing substantial benefits to different stakeholders, ranging from the entities which develop energy efficient measures to everyone in society. In addition to cost savings, multiple benefits can be achieved by supporting a better alignment between energy issues and...

The Italian legislative decree 210/2015, converted into law 21/2016 (known as Milleproroghe Decree) sets out that the regulatory authority for electricity, gas and water must re-determine by January 2018 the structure of the electricity tariff components related to the system costs applied to non household customers. The objectives of this reform a...

This paper presents an economic order quantity (EOQ) inventory model with partial backordering, where a buyer purchases its required products from a supplier. Each received batch from the supplier includes a random proportion of defective items. In other words, supplier’s production process works to a random yield. A recursive solution method to fi...

Industrial symbiosis represents a great opportunity for boosting energy efficiency, shifting the focus from a single industry to cluster of firms. Collaboration and synergistic possibilities offered by geographic proximity lead to great competitive advantages involving waste and resources flows. Energy clustering can provide relevant benefits hardl...

Energy efficiency is gaining increasingly attention from industries and from several other stakeholders since energy costs cover a significant share of the industrial total cost for manufacturing companies. The improvement of the performances and the consequent reduction of energy consumption lead to multiple extra benefits in addition to cost savi...

This paper investigates impacts of merging components and reduction of sub-assemblies by exploiting additive manufacturing (AM) capabilities to allow for production of various components forming the final part composition as just one single part. The analysis is performed by considering a base structure for part composition, and inclusion of final...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a recent and rapidly developing technology, which has brought about significant disruptions in manufacturing arena. To capture the full spectrum of changes resulting from AM’s introduction into industry, it is not sufficient to look at it just as a disruptive set of technologies but, rather, take a system’s approach....

This contribution presents a production-inventory model for a supply chain that incorporates three distinct entities a Vendor, a third-party external Manufacturer and a Buyer. The Vendor purchases raw materials from a supplier and performs preliminary manufacturing operations, the semi-finished goods are sent to a third-party Manufacturer for addit...

This paper investigates impacts of merging components and reduction of sub-assemblies by exploiting additive manufacturing (AM) capabilities to allow for production of various components forming the final part composition as just one single part. The analysis is performed by considering a base structure for part composition, and inclusion of final...

Steel industry is one of the largest energy consumers in the manufacturing sector and covers a great share of the total energy consumptions in the world. As in recent years, energy efficiency has been a top priority for the European Commission, which set a reduction of 20% as a target for the energy consumption, so that great improvements in energy...

As steel industry is a major energy consumer, huge improvements in EAF's energy efficiency has already been performed; thus, additional progresses are difficult. The main opportunity is to adopt a holistic approach considering all the relevant process components, especially the electric transformer, since all the melting energy pass through it. EAF...

The consignment stock (CS) policy, independently or coupled with vendor managed inventory (VMI), has been practised by businesses and shown to be profitable. It helps to reduce or eliminate out-of-stock instances caused by fluctuations in demand. CS brings several benefits to collaborating parties. Unlike the two-level supply chain models in the li...

Incorporation of quality and environmental concerns in production and inventory models has received considerable attention in the inventory management literature; however, researchers studied these topics mostly independently. Thus, it is required to jointly incorporate those two relevant aspects in a single research to support decisions, compare t...

The increase of renewable energy sources (RES) installations all over the world during the past decades leads to a more sustainable energy scenario, however some drawbacks still persists and hinder the complete replacement of traditional fossil fuels. One of the main challenging issue is related to the intermittent production that generates serious...

Energy storage systems (ESS) have recently been subject of a widespread interest among the energy market. This great relevance is due to the opportunity of ESS to overcome or, at least, mitigate the drawbacks caused by the intermittency and uncertainty of renewable energy sources (RES), that are posing relevant challenges to the operation and manag...

This paper presents two models (classical and VMI-CS coordination) for a two-level closed-loop supply chain with a manufacturer and a retailer with a facility to remanufacture used items. The paper considers three critical environmental issues, which are the energy used in production (manufacturing and remanufacturing) processes, GHG emissions from...

Inventory Management (IM) techniques help in minimizing (maximizing) the total cost (profit) of a supply chain and enhance its performance. Different models have been developed within the supply chain area to manage inventories and solve related issues (i.e. logistics and transportation). Consignment stock (CS) is an IM technique that has been show...

This paper is a focus study to introduce an alternative approach to the existing ones, which could be taken to implement Additive Manufacturing (AM) systems for industrial applications. This approach is mainly based on the use of Product Service Systems (PSS) concept in order to turn AM into a more relevant field for service-based purposes within i...

The rapid pace of e-commerce development has resulted in several manufacturers selling their products online to stay competitive and increase accessibility to their products. This paper investigates the effect of adopting a dual-channel (comprised of a traditional retail channel and a direct online channel) on the performance of a two-level supply...

The reduction of energy consumptions is a relevant topic all around the world, since recently the international attention has been focused on stringent and environmental-friendly targets. These targets result extremely imperative for the steel industry as it is one of the major energy consumer among the different sectors. Several huge improvements...

The pursuit of better coordination schemes is crucial for contemporary supply chains to survive in a highly competitive environment. A supply chain may employ revenue sharing, information sharing and quantity discounts etc. to gain that viable edge. Another recent trend is to store vendor's inventory at the buyer's warehouse, known as vendor-manage...

Establishing long-term relationships among the members of a supply chain has become necessary to enhance the supply chain's competitiveness in a globalized environment. Besides coordinating operational decisions, such as how much and when to produce or to order, the members of a supply chain may also share financial resources or act jointly on the...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) refers to a set of production methods which comprises not only the technologies and their corresponding manufacturing processes, it also includes the supportive underlying platforms and infrastructures such as automation and CAD interfaces whose proper implementation would sometimes necessitate drastic changes to take pl...

The responsible management of product return flows in production and inventory environments is a rapidly increasing requirement for companies. This can be attributed to economic, environmental and/or regulatory motivations. Mathematical modeling of such systems has assisted decision-making processes and provided a better understanding of the behavi...

Inventories account for almost 50% of the total logistics costs of a supply chain. Therefore, managing inventories helps organizations to reduce costs, increase profits, and satisfy customers’ demand. Different inventory models have been developed to solve transportation and warehousing issues. These models help in optimizing different supply chain...

With an ever growing diffusion of additive manufacturing (AM) system in industrial and consumer level, as well as the direct and indirect dynamics which are being introduced resulting from its inclusion as a viable production system on companies' portfolio, the need to reconfigure production system and adapt the production line becomes even more re...

With an ever growing diffusion of Additive Manufacturing (AM) system in industrial and commercial level, as well as the direct and indirect dynamics which are being introduced resulting from its inclusion as a possible production technology on companies’ portfolio, the need to reconfigure production system and adapt the production strategy becomes...

In order to support energy efficiency improvement, it is essential to monitor the energy performance and to make benchmarking with similar process or related Best Available Techniques. Among different key performance indicators that compare similar processes, the most relevant for the industrial sector is the specific energy consumption (SEC). With...

The improvement of energy efficiency of 20 % is one of the three objectives of the EU Directive 20-20-20. To reach this goal, all production processes have to be analysed with reference to their energy consumption so as to identify actions aimed at removing or reducing energy wastes. From the Lean Production framework, the variation of the Value St...

With an ever growing diffusion of Additive Manufacturing (AM) system in industrial and commercial level, as well as the direct and indirect dynamics which are being introduced resulting from its inclusion as a possible production technology on companies' portfolio, the need to reconfigure produc‐ tion system and adapt the production strategy become...

Guaranteeing environmentally conscious supply chain operations is closely linked to an organization’s sustainability and success. This paper presents two models that consider energy used for production along with the greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from production and transportation operations in a single-vendor (manufacturer) single-buyer system...

The proliferating use of AM as a production method within various fields of industry has facilitated its progress from a prototyping-only method towards a viable manufacturing practice which has the ability to be applied in various fields, ranging from aerospace and defense to medical and optical industries. In order to implement AM, both technolo...

Production systems are usually organised in departments consisting of machines, each one characterised by specific patterns of energy demand over time. This work proposes an analytical approach, based on the application of Queuing Theory, to model the power request and the consequent energy use in a production system. Despite the industrial context...

The lean approach, successfully applied in the manufacturing and service sectors, can be seen as an approach to reducing delays in courts. However, a straightforward application of lean can be difficult in heterogeneous environments: judicial systems typically deal with a very large number of individual and infinitely different cases. Therefore, al...

This paper presents a vendor-managed inventory (VMI) with consignment stock (CS) policy applied to the integrated vendor–buyer system, where the demand at the buyer side is stock dependent. Under the VMI with CS, the vendor manufactures a product and delivers it in batches of equal sizes to the buyer: although the goods are in the warehouse of the...

A vendor managed system with the Consignment Stock agreement is a business practice where a buyer's inventory remains the property of the vendor until its withdrawal by the final customer demand. Such an agreement has shown to be a profitable stock management approach, especially when operating in uncertain environments where delivery lead times an...

Most developed countries around the world are seriously concerned about recent global warming, the depletion of fossil fuels and environmental degradation. So as to meet the environmental burden reduction targets set by different international agreements, manufacturing companies are seriously encouraged to invest considerable efforts in the field o...