Maritime freight transport represents an effective solution, allowing to ensure a low-impact
service both under an economic and a sustainable perspective. As a consequence, in the last
ten years, an increasing trend of goods transported by sea has been observed. In order to
improve the terminal containers’ performance, recently published scientific studies shown
the applicability of the ‘lean logistic’ concept as a strategic key for ensuring a continuous
improvement of the logistic chain for inter-/intra terminal containers’ activities. According
to this approach, the adoption of a dry port can positively affect terminal containers’ performance,
but this requires resources and investments due to inter-terminal activities (e.g.
transport of the container from port to dry port and vice versa). The purpose of the study is
to develop a mathematical programming optimization model to support the decision making
in identifying the best containers’ handling strategy for intermodal facilities, according to
lean and green perspectives. Numerical experiments shown the effectiveness of the model in
identifying efficient material handling strategies under lean and green perspective.
The study on cognitive workload is a field of research of high interest in the digital society.
The implementation of ‘Industry 4.0’ paradigm asks the smart operators in the digital factory
to accomplish more ‘cognitive-oriented’ than ‘physical-oriented’ tasks. The Authors propose
an analytical model in the information theory framework to estimate the cognitive workload
of operators. In the model, subjective and physiological measures are adopted to measure
the work load. The former refers to NASA-TLX test expressing subjective perceived work
load. The latter adopts Heart Rate Variability (HRV) of individuals as an objective indirect
measure of the work load. Subjective and physiological measures have been obtained by
experiments on a sample subjects. Subjects were asked to accomplish standardized tasks
with different cognitive loads according to the ‘n-back’ test procedure defined in literature.
Results obtained showed potentialities and limits of the analytical model proposed as well as
of the experimental subjective and physiological measures adopted. Research findings pave
the way for future developments.