RESUMO
Vaccination is one of the most effective ways to prevent and control the outbreak of infectious diseases. The vaccine supply chain differs from the traditional supply chains because of the perishability of the products, which need strict transport and warehousing conditions to guarantee the health and safety of people. In addition, in case of pandemics, the big amount of doses requested for the implementation of a mass vaccination campaign forces governments to design a proper logistic network and plan a rapid and efficient distribution of vaccines. This paper studies the organization of allocation and distribution of the covid-19 vaccines in Italy. The main criticalities in managing the vaccine supply chain have been identified and, because of its peculiarities, the blockchain has been considered a suitable technology to solve them. A simulation model has been developed to reproduce the current distribution of vaccines in Italy, and a future scenario with blockchain has been studied. The findings show that it is possible to improve the performance of the vaccine supply chain and make it more resilient by implementing the blockchain technology.
RESUMO
At the end of 2019, a severe respiratory syndrome named COVID-19 is started to be transmitted in the world and it has rapidly spread to a global pandemic. Every day, a series of data are collected for real-time monitoring of the development of this pandemic. The data validation and the verification are becoming very important to manage the pandemic and give recommendations to the people. Nevertheless, sometimes, it is not possible to guarantee the truthfulness of such data and some information may be lost during collection. Due to its characteristics, the Blockchain technology can become an important support to face the COVID-19 pandemic. In this regard, the aim of this research is to propose a literature review to understand how the blockchain technology has been used for health care and supply chain management to guarantee an efficient tracing, tracking, and monitoring solution, ensure a transparent and safe data transmission, and to delineate the emerging future research directions.
RESUMO
The optimization of production processes has always been one of the cornerstones for manufacturing companies, aimed to increase their productivity, minimizing the related costs. In the Industry 4.0 era, some innovative technologies, perceived as far away until a few years ago, have become reachable by everyone. The massive introduction of these technologies directly in the factories allows interconnecting the resources (machines and humans) and the entire production chain to be kept under control, thanks to the collection and the analyses of real production data, supporting the decision making process. This article aims to propose a methodological framework that, thanks to the use of Industrial Internet of Things-IoT devices, in particular the wearable sensors, and simulation tools, supports the analyses of production line performance parameters, by considering both experimental and numerical data, allowing a continuous monitoring of the line balancing and performance at varying of the production demand. A case study, regarding a manual task of a real manufacturing production line, is presented to demonstrate the applicability and the effectiveness of the proposed procedure.
