Ricerc@Sapienza

Aerospace industry has increasing interest in Additive Manufacturing (AM) since its beginnings in the ‘80s and in the last decade new advancements in these technologies have led a proliferation of applications from the prototyping to the direct part manufacturing, rapid tooling and repairing. AM for aerospace industry is no more only a very promising production technology but a real product/process/business game-changer offering opportunities previously unfeasible.

Spare parts management affects significantly costs and service level for supply chains. This paper deals with an inventory management problem for multi-item repairable systems via a systemic perspective based on a new efficient integer black-box optimization model. With respect to the traditionally used marginal allocation that considers items individually, the proposed black-box optimization model is a holistic approach in the fact that it exploits relationships among items.

We propose blockchains and smart contracts as enabling technologies for an innovative type of supply chain management, with the goal of achieving higher levels of collaboration between the companies participating in the chain, which in turn pays in the form of higher levels of profitability and economic health for the participating enterprises. Our proposal goes far beyond simply using blockchains as decentralized systems to track the origin and delivery of goods, which is what most of the current blockchain projects on supply chains are focused on.

Blockchain technology opens up new opportunities for Business Process Management. This is mainly due to its unprecedented capability to let transactions be automatically executed and recorded by Smart Contracts in multi-peer environments, in a decentralised fashion and without central authoritative players to govern the workflow. In this way, blockchains also provide traceability. Traceability of information plays a pivotal role particularly in those supply chains where multiple parties are involved and rigorous criteria must be fulfilled to lead to a successful outcome.

A current key challenge in the field of urban freight transport is creating value and business opportunities through city logistics. This requires an extensive knowledge of the composition of urban economic structure, organization and management of supply chains, and actors’ sensitivity to market signals. Within this context, the paper reports the findings of the LOGeco – LOGistica ecologica project.