Design and management of a supply chain: a joint location-inventory problem under uncertainty (Part B)

In recent years, global supply chains have increasingly suffered from reliability issues due to various external and difficult to-manage events. The following paper aims to build an integrated approach for the design of a Supply Chain under the risk of disruption and demand fluctuation. The study is divided in two parts: a mathematical optimization model, to identify the optimal design and assignments customer-facility, and a discrete-events simulation of the resulting network. The first one describes a model in which plant location decisions are influenced by variables such as distance to customers, investments needed to open plants and centralization phenomena that help contain the risk of demand variability (Risk Pooling). The entire model has been built with a proactive approach to manage the risk of disruptions assigning to each customer two types of open facilities: one that will serve it under normal conditions and a back-up facility, which comes into operation when the main facility has failed. The study is conducted on a relatively small number of instances due to the computational complexity, a matheuristic approach can be found in part A of the paper to evaluate the problem with a larger set of players. Once the network is built, a discrete events Supply Chain simulation (SCS) has been implemented to analyze the stock flow within the facilities warehouses, the actual impact of disruptions and the role of the back-up facilities which suffer a great stress on their inventory due to a large increase in demand caused by the disruptions. Therefore, simulation follows a reactive approach, in which customers are redistributed among facilities according to the interruptions that may occur in the system and to the assignments deriving from the design model. Lastly, the most important results of the study will be reported, analyzing the role of lead time in a reactive approach for the occurrence of disruptions and comparing the two models in terms of costs.

HBIM to Virtual Reality Workflow for Industrial Archaeology Immovable Assets’ Management: A Case Study

As a witness on the industrialization in Bologna, since its first generation was born in the late 1760, the Battiferro lock has been coping with the innovation that the city experienced throughout the centuries, until it has lost its functionality due to the technological development for which Bologna’s canals were gradually covered starting from the 1950s under Giuseppe Dozza ’s administration, as part of the reconstruction, reclamation and urban requalification that was carried out in the aftermath the World War II and which involved the whole city. The interest of the research carried out on this case study was primarily to reintroduce the landmark that is still intact, to what is considered to be the fourth generation of the industrial revolution, namely in the construction field, which is recognized as Construction 4.0, by means of the Historic (or Heritage) Information Modeling HBIM and Virtual Reality (VR) application. A scan-to-BIM approach was followed to create 3D as-built BIM model, as a first step towards the storytelling of the abandoned industrial built asset in VR environment, or as a seed for future applications such as Digital Twins (DT), heritage digital learning, sustainable impact studies, and/or interface with other interfaces such as GIS. Based on the HBIM product, examples of the primary BIM deliverables such as 2D layouts is given, then a workflow to VR is proposed and investigated the reliability of data and the type of users that may benefit of the VR experience, then the potential future development of the model is investigated, with comparison of a relatively similar experience in the UK.