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Topic Review
Circular Economy under Multi-Parametric Approach
A circular economy (CE) is conceptualized under different rounds of materials and energy cycling flows and is a matter of a three-level deployment: inter-enterprise circulation, regional circulation, and social circulation. 
  • 615
  • 08 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Italian Agri-Food Sector under COVID-19
Here we have carried out a multidisciplinary analysis of the impact that COVID-19 had on the Italian agri-food sector during the national lockdown. In our opinion, this unprecedented economic crisis could be a turning point to deal with the overall sustainability of agricultural systems and foodstuffs. We suggest to focus on applied research and development, and technology transfer, the so called university “Third Mission,” an area where the role of academia may be crucial and could add not only innovation and valorisation to the production chains of local enterprises, but also support the establishment of business networks in specific production segments.
  • 730
  • 06 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Data Centre Industry
The data centre industry (DCI) has grown from zero in the 1980s, to enabling 60% of the global population to be connected in 2021 via 7.2 million data centres. The DCI is based on a linear economy and there is an urgent need to transform to a Circular Economy to establish a secure supply chain and ensure an economically stable and uninterrupted service, which is particularly difficult in an industry that is comprised of ten insular subsectors.
  • 507
  • 03 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Eco-Innovation
Eco-innovation refers to “the production, assimilation or exploitation of a product, production process, service or management or business method that is novel to the organization (developing or adopting it) and which results, throughout its life cycle, in a reduction of environmental risk, pollution and other negative impacts of resources use (including energy use) compared to relevant alternatives”. Eco-innovation has been used as a synonym for “environmental innovation”, “green innovation,” and “sustainable innovation” depending on the author and the outlet where the research is published.
  • 1.8K
  • 01 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Blockchain Technology and Tokenization
Blockchain is an open-source technology that excludes the traditional third parties by relying on collective verification, thus offering a great alternative in terms of costs, traceability, security, and speed. When two financial entities such as banks receive a request to transfer money from one account to another, they have to update the balances of their respective customers. This costly and time-consuming coordination and synchronization exercise can be simplified on a blockchain by using a single ledger of transactions reflecting a single version of records instead of two different databases. Blockchain technology offers a myriad of value through a frictionless process of immutable and transparent records and through converting assets into digital tokens (i.e., tokenization) with smart contracts. 
  • 1.8K
  • 01 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Sustainable Consumption and Value Orientations
Sustainable consumption refers to consumption choices that are made by consumers who are considering environmental, social  and/or ethical issues during their purchase decision. When engaging in sustainable consumption, consumers assess whether products are benevolent to the environment, recyclable or conservable, and responsive to social, ecological and ethical concerns. Personal value orientations capture the importance that individuals attach to certain general values and the extent to which individuals adhere to these values as guiding principles in their lives. Three types of values have been associated with pro-environmental behaviour: egoistic (threats to oneself), social–altruistic (threats to others), and biospheric (threats to nature or the environment). 
  • 1.4K
  • 01 Jun 2021
Topic Review
CCR Model (DEA)
The first Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model developed by Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes (1978) under the assumption of a Constant Returns to Scale production technology, i.e.,  when an increase in the production resources results in a proportional increase in the output.
  • 15.4K
  • 30 May 2021
Topic Review
Outsourcing of human resources
The outsourcing of human resources has increased in recent years. As in other fields of management research, limited knowledge is available on outsourcing in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The aim of this paper is to present a study on the outsourcing of human resources in Icelandic service SMEs in the period 2009–2018. Surveys were used to gather information on outsourcing, with the participation of 802 firms. The results show that three out of four firms have outsourced some activities, while only 21% have formulated a formal strategy for outsourcing. The main motives for outsourcing are accessing expertise and simplifying operations. Cost reduction comes in third place. SMEs tend to outsource human resources on a very limited scale, while 50% of firms outsource information technology and 39% outsource security services. Larger firms outsource human resources on a larger scale than smaller firms. Managers in companies that outsource human resources are more satisfied with many aspects of outsourcing compared to those managers who do not outsource those resources. Firms that outsource human resources also realise more actual cost reduction. Outsourcing in SMEs has little impact on employment, as 3% of firms lay off staff and 6% transfer staff to vendors. Larger firms and firms that outsource human resources are more likely to change their staff’s employment status after outsourcing.
  • 452
  • 26 May 2021
Topic Review
Graph Modeling of Shop Schedulings
Graphs are powerful tools to model manufacturing systems and scheduling problems. The complexity of these systems and their scheduling problems has been substantially increased by the ongoing technological development. Thus, it is essential to generate sustainable graph-based modeling approaches to deal with these excessive complexities. Graphs employ nodes and edges to represent the relationships between jobs, machines, operations, etc. Despite the significant volume of publications applying graphs to shop scheduling problems, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey study. We proposed the first comprehensive review paper which 1) systematically studies the overview and the perspective of this field, 2) highlights the gaps and potential hotspots of the literature, and 3) suggests future research directions towards sustainable graphs modeling the new intelligent/complex systems. We carefully examined 143 peer-reviewed journal papers published from 2015 to 2020. About 70% of our dataset were published in top-ranked journals which confirms the validity of our data and can imply the importance of this field. After discussing our generic data collection methodology, we proposed categorizations over the properties of the scheduling problems and their solutions. Then, we discussed our novel categorization over the variety of graphs modeling scheduling problems. Finally, as the most important contribution, we generated a creative graph-based model from scratch to represent the gaps and hotspots of the literature accompanied with statistical analysis on our dataset. Our analysis showed a significant attention towards job shop systems (56%) and Un/Directed Graphs (52%) where edges can be either directed, or undirected, or both. Whereas 14% of our dataset applied only Undirected Graphs, and 11% targeted hybrid systems, e.g., mixed shop, flexible and cellular manufacturing systems which shows potential future research directions.
  • 1.8K
  • 25 May 2021
Topic Review
Reverse Logistics
Reverse logistics is a term commonly used to describe the management of end-of-life products, and mostly refers to the terms reduce, reuse, remanufacture, and recycle. Reduce is a term that refers to waste reduction in manufacturing and the packaging of products. The term reuse refers to the return of an unused product to the manufacturer in order to put the product back into use. The term remanufacture refers to a process of repairing, restoring, or overhauling products to extend their lifespan. Recycle refers to a process in which any component of a product that contains a certain value is returned to the manufacturer. RL should be designed outside the company and should not be limited by waste collection and recycling actions, but other activities should also be included to preserve the value and usefulness of materials for the longest possible period, which would make significant gains for the company’s value chain. Implementing RL helps reduce production waste and helps companies make a profit.
  • 693
  • 21 May 2021
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