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Coffee is one of the most important commodities in the world. Every year the coffee industry is responsible for generating a large amount of wastes, mainly Spent Coffee Grounds (SCGs). The traditional disposal of this residue into the environment should be avoided due to its toxicity and organic character. Because of the decrease in nonrenewable natural resources, society has been making a huge effort to valorize and reuse several types of wastes in the production of novel sustainable products. In this regard, construction is considered one of the most energy-intensive sectors. As a consequence, the goals of sustainability and energy efficiency must be prosecuted to achieve the results expected by the recent European directives and national regulations. The present paper aims at providing further knowledge on wastes recycling, analyzing the influence of the SCG incorporation as an aggregate in construction materials. To this purpose, the produced mortar specimens are firstly characterized. Afterwards, engineering properties as well as environmental and economic aspects are taken into account to rank the considered mixtures by a multicriteria approach. The performed analysis highlights how the addition of the considered industrial wastes is strongly recommended to improve the performance of materials intended for various applications in construction.

In recent years, the partnerships between private companies and public organizations are becoming key elements for improving local development, territorial competitiveness, and delivering innovation. These collaborations are widely promoted by the European Framework Programme for Research and Innovation thanks to the provision of several instruments, such as Horizon 2020. In this context, competitiveness's improvement of the territory employing research and innovation actions is supported by the technological districts. In Sicily, the AgroBioPesca district has attempted a strategic action named "Call for ideas" in order to design its own roadmap for research and innovation in the agri-food sector. For this purpose, many proponents of public and/or private sectors presented several innovative project ideas referred to specific Technological Trajectories. This paper aims at providing an instrument able to select the most suitable project ideas in order to constitute the AgroBioPesca projects portfolio. To such an aim, the authors propose the application of the multiple criteria sorting method ELECTRE TRI considering criteria deduced by the Horizon 2020 guidelines and documents. The application of this methodology allows subdividing the project ideas received into project ideas to be rejected, reviewable, and eligible for funding. Moreover, to consider the uncertainty of the decision-makers' judgment, the authors propose a new version of the method in which the crisp judgment is converted into an interval. A sensitivity analysis has lastly been conducted to study the weaknesses of non-financiable projects.

Despite the recent interest towards food safety and control, it is generally difficult to ensure full products traceability through industrial food chains, due to the lack of efficient information and communication systems. Consequently, nowadays, the protection of food products often ends at the gates of the producer without any investigation about the status of their quality at the consumer’s location. The aim of this paper was the development of a supply chain monitoring system based on a smart logistic unit (SLU) to support the integrated management of the food supply chain from “farm to fork” in order to guarantee and control food safety and shelf life (SL) of products in agreement with logistic efficiency and system sustainability. For this purpose we have conducted a research involving the selec- tion of a perishable product significantly affected by logistic decisions, the determination of the set parameters representative of its quality and the development of a prototype of SLU, based on a sensor network for monitoring the identified parameters. Finally, an experimental SL model has been determined, based on the volatile organic compounds emitted from fruits and monitored by the SLU. We have validated the model by simulating real transport conditions and assessing the residual SL of the product at different time intervals.

Due to the ever increasing diffusion of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) in logistic processes, the localization of the tags in the environment is becoming an important feature for many RFID-based inventory management systems. RFID-based Location system will allow offering value-added services logistics operators, and RFID tags can be used for more than just labeling items. This paper proposes a Received Signal Strength (RSS) based positioning system for perishable products equipped with active UHF RFID tags inside a refrigerated warehouse (4C°). The major performance metrics of interest for indoor positioning systems are the accuracy and the precision in estimating signal strength within the coverage map. A fundamental problem in the design of RFID based localization system is the evaluation and mapping of the signals attenuation, which depends upon several parameters (fading from obstacles in the transmission path, reflections off surfaces and relative antenna orientation). Theoretical path loss models are therefore inadequate for a reliable prediction of the signal strength. In this paper, the design of the RFID localization system is tackled considering an initial experimental analysis of the ranging error with respect to the signal strength. The position of the antennas and the corresponding coverage map is finally obtained by means of a simulation tool based on 2D ray tracing algorithm, taking into account how the real environmental conditions in the warehouse, like temperature, humidity and the presence of the storage infrastructures, influence the attenuation of the signal.

Recent developments in maintenance planning and management demonstrate that the establishment of optimized maintenance policies may drastically improve the performance and reduce the operating cost of facilities. However maintenance activities are typically outside of the core business of production facilities, hence enterprises often fail to catch the opportunities that may originate by properly optimized management strategies. A strategic maintenance management should hence encompass the possibility of outsourcing maintenance activities to ensure the necessary perfomance of production systems, while allowing enterprises to concentrate their resources on their core activities. In order to be effectively undertaken an outsourcing strategy must be supported by a proper performance oriented contract. The present paper aims to provide an adequate methodology to address such issues and to define a framework for the definition of the relevant contract variables such as availability levels, penalty policies, rewards and service cost. The methodology here proposed is based upon the evaluation of the expected profit function of both the outsourcer and the provider, by performing a trade-off analysis on the basis of the transaction costs.

Post-harvest losses of perishable products strongly depend on inefficiencies of the entire supply chain. In particular, these inefficiencies can be reduced by optimizing the warehouse management, taking into account the remaining shelf life of the product, and matching it to the requirements of the subsequent part of the handling chain. The replacement of First In First Out picking rule with Last Shelf Life First Out policy has been proved to improve the overall performance of the supply chain. The practicability of such approach is related to the possibility of monitoring the deterioration rate of the products and of predicting the residual shelf-life, that is mainly influenced by harvesting conditions. Shelf-life based inventory management policies are seldom employed, generally due to the difficulties in the assessment of the environmental conditions. Such problem can be overcome by means of an automatic system able to acquire the volatile organic compound emitted by the product and of a communication tool that allows sending the information to be processed. RF technologies can be efficiently employed to reach this purpose in order to establish a shelf-life based prediction model. The present paper reports the technical/economic analysis related to the employment of an RF warehouse management system in an agro-industrial supply chain based upon an experimental campaign performed in a real case study.