Luca Urciuoli

Cultural heritage buildings are increasingly exposed to climate-related hazards, yet conventional conservation approaches often give insufficient consideration to climate resilience and adaptive capacity. This study proposes a Heritage Climate Resilience Index (HCRI) for assessing the resilience of cultural heritage buildings under changing climatic conditions. The framework integrates climate hazard exposure, heritage-specific building characteristics, and a dynamic weighting scheme that reflects local hazard conditions. It is applied to two case studies in Bac Giang, Vietnam, and Riga, Latvia, representing distinct climatic and heritage contexts. The assessment demonstrates the framework’s ability to distinguish differences in resilience performance and to identify vulnerable building domains requiring targeted intervention. The results provide a basis for prioritizing adaptation and conservation measures according to site-specific conditions. By combining local climate information with heritage-sensitive assessment criteria, the HCRI provides a practical, transferable tool for climate-informed heritage management. The proposed framework can support stakeholders in prioritizing interventions, allocating resources, and strengthening the long-term resilience of cultural heritage buildings under increasingly frequent and severe climate-related risks.

Air transport systems are adapting to post-pandemic changes in passenger demand, capacity constraints, sustainability objectives, and resilience requirements. Within this context, airports are not only terminal facilities but multimodal infrastructure nodes whose performance depends on the interaction between air services, surface-access systems, and passenger behaviour. This paper examines whether differential pricing of airport surface-access modes can be used as an air-transport policy instrument to influence modal choice, passenger arrival patterns, and congestion at security screening checkpoints. The study focuses on passenger travel from central Stockholm to Arlanda Airport and combines empirical evidence with a hybrid discrete-event and agent-based simulation model. Passenger origins are generated from spatial-demographic data, modal choices are represented through a multinomial logit model, and checkpoint operations are simulated under alternative pricing scenarios. The baseline scenario reproduces a modal split dominated by bus and train access, which concentrates passenger arrivals into scheduled waves and increases security-queue waiting times. A differential-pricing scenario, in which taxi and private car access become relatively more attractive, generates more dispersed arrivals and reduces average security-queue waiting time from 16.66 to 11.58 minutes, corresponding to a 30.5% reduction. The results show that pricing policies regulating surface acess can have measurable effects inside airport infrastructure. However, these operational gains must be assessed against wider policy objectives, including emissions, road congestion, accessibility, equity, and public-transport use. The paper contributes to air-transport policy by linking surface-access pricing, multimodal demand management, airport resilience, and terminal service performance.

Business world has reached a complexity tipping point, increasing the risk of disruption consequences not to remain localised in a single company but to reverberate on the entire Supply Chain. Literature now pays great attention to studying this ripple effect, which can critically undermine resilience of the entire Supply Chain. This work further investigates ripple effect by analysing the presence of cycles among these chain reactions using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. This methodology allows to link multidimensional and multidisciplinary concepts: by unveiling this information, managers and policymakers are provided with more details about the system behaviour. The research method exemplified uncovers the causal relationships among factors influencing Supply Chain Resilience, providing necessary insight to break or reinforce such connections. A case study of an automotive industry Supply Chain is presented to show the application of the proposed methodology into an operating context: 15 different cycles have been enumerated, explaining how connections among these factors ultimately impact Supply Chain Resilience.

Decision-making supported by digital ecosystems has been increasingly studied during recent years, especially due to improved technical capabilities to collect, store, and analyze large amounts of data. The literature recognizes that these systems can reduce response time of managers and enhance a cost-efficient recovery of supply chains. However, there is a lack of methodological frameworks to evaluate the benefits of these platforms. In addition, there is still little understanding of the risks in ocean container transport and their implications for supply chains. This paper proposes and applies a mathematical model for evaluating the impacts of digital platforms, with a focus on solutions to mitigate risks in sea transport operations. The model is based on scenarios and decision tree models to evaluate the impacts of a supply chain digital ecosystem on full containers shipped from Asia to Europe implemented by four companies. Results show monetary savings per scenario in the range from €3448 to €79,242. The most significant savings are expected on unplanned transshipments, cargo damage, export inspections, container detention, and container release.

Recent studies have found positive effects from hospital focus on both quality and cost. Some studies indicate that certain patient segments benefit from focus, while others have worse outcomes in focused hospital departments. The aim of this study was to establish the relationship between hospital focus and performance in elective surgery. We studied obesity surgery procedures performed in Sweden in 2016 (5152 patients), using data from the Scandinavian Obesity Surgery Registry (SOReg) complemented by a survey of all clinics that performed obesity surgery. We examined focus at two levels of the organization: hospital level and department level. We hypothesized that higher proportions of obesity surgery patients in the hospital, and higher proportions of obesity surgery procedures in the department, would be associated with better performance. These hypotheses were tested using multilevel regression analysis, while controlling for patient characteristics and procedural volume. We found that focus was associated with improved outcomes in terms of reduced complications and shorter procedure times. These positive relationships were present at both hospital and department level, but the effect was larger at the department level. The findings imply that focus is a viable strategy to improve quality and reduce costs for patients undergoing elective surgery. For these patients, general hospitals should consider implementing organizationally separate units for patients undergoing elective surgery.

Fuel is one of the most important cost items that road carriers include in their freight rates. It has been demonstrated that unexpected changes of fuel costs influence mobility, logistics performance and profit margins. Experts believe that criminal organizations are targeting the transport sector to steal, smuggle and contraband diesel fuel. Today, very little data exist across the scientific community, depicting this phenomenon. Hence, the goal of this study is to shed light on the problem of diesel theft in freight transport, with a focus on determining its magnitude, its geographical displacement, main modus operandi, and potential impact of protective measures. A survey is developed and used to collect data from members of the Swedish Association of Road Transport companies. Replies from 189 companies are collected (18.9% response rate) and analyzed. Overall, this study unveils that about 150,225 l of fuels have been stolen from Swedish road carriers. In addition, data reveals that only a minority of these companies are affected by the problem, opening the hypothesis that attacks are geographically concentrated in areas where transport/logistics operations are intense. Several devices are available today to avoid fuel theft. Among those, tank gauging and radar-based technologies are preferred by companies, in view of their deterring effects.