Giovanni Luca Pirovano

Drug distribution performed through hospital pharmacies facilitates public expenditure savings but incurs higher social costs for patients and caregivers. The widespread presence of community pharmacies could support patient access while also improving drug distribution. The implementation of prescriptive data analyses as constrained optimization to achieve specific objectives, could be also applied with good results in the healthcare context. Assuming the perspective of the Italian National Healthcare Service, the present study, built upon existing research in this field, proposes a decision support tool that is able to define which self-administered drugs for chronic diseases should be distributed by community pharmacies, answering to critical challenges in the case of future pandemics and healthcare emergencies, while also providing suggestions for the institutional decision-making process. Moreover, the tool aids in determining the optimal setup of the drug distribution network, comparing centralized (hospital pharmacies) and decentralized (community pharmacies) approaches, as well as their economic and social implications.

As urgency in limiting greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions has increased, greening freight and perishable food logistics activities has become an issue of interest. Intermodal rail-road transportation allows for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. However, one of the reasons this mode is traditionally not employed to move perishable food is because it is considered to be economically unsustainable. This paper aims to present a new transportation model for perishable food (named ‘traveling stock’), which removes the barriers to the implementation of the intermodal transportation of perishable food. Moreover, based on a methodology for quantifying the economic sustainability of the new logistics model, this paper outlines the assessment through a case study. The work finds that the level to which consumers appreciate product variety influences the extent of economic sustainability for the intermodal transportation of perishable products.

This work proposes and tests an algorithm for batching and dispatching lots along cleaning and diffusion operations of a wafer fab. These are characterised by: 1) time constraints (i.e., the time between the end of an operation 'n' and the start of the operation 'n + q' must be lower than a time limit, in order to guarantee the lots' quality); 2) absence of batching affinity between operations. Literature so far has been falling short in proposing scheduling algorithms suitable for this context. Therefore, we propose two heuristic algorithms to minimise the average flow time and the number of re-cleaned lots, maximise machine saturation and avoid scrapped lots. Discrete-event simulation was used to test the performance of the two algorithms using real data of STMicroelectronics. The formerly proposed model outperforms the latter. Therefore, STMicroelectronics implemented the former in its fab in Catania gaining an increase in the average Overall equipment effectiveness of 7%.

This article introduces a simulation ontology to support terminal planers, operator and managers in the design and management of seaport container terminals. Due to the increasing requirements of shipping companies regarding efficiency, quality and price for the handling processes at container terminals, the use of integrated approaches for improving the performance has grown significantly. Simulation, which has proven highly beneficial in production and logistics, represents an adequate tool to deal with complex systems like container terminals. However, building simulation models requires much time and simulation software know-how. To counteract this effect, this article presents a simulation ontology of seaport container terminals, which supports the user in building specific simulation models. Since the simulation model is automatically created through the ontology framework, neither the personnel skills nor the time available to build the simulation model represent significant hurdles. Furthermore, the proposed ontology can dramatically reduce the time required to test a specific configuration of a container terminal and/or a particular management policy. The ontology framework consists of a user interface with database, where the user can specify elements and their parameters, an atom library representing all elements of the system and software application, which is used to automatically build the simulation model.