Impact of RFID and EPCglobal on Critical Processes of the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

The need to implement and guarantee effective item-level tracing systems is becoming more and more important for a wide range of business applications, such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and anti-counterfeiting. Among these, the pharmaceutical supply chain, with millions of medicines moving around the world and needing to be traced at item level, represents a very interesting reference scenario. Furthermore, the growing counterfeiting problem raises a significant threat within the supply chain system. Recently, several international institutions (e.g. Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency, European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, GS1) are encouraging the use of innovative solutions in healthcare and in the pharmaceutical supply chain, to improve patient safety and enhance the efficiency of the pharmaceutical supply chain, with better worldwide drug traceability

A portal of educational resources: providing evidence for matching pedagogy with technology

The TPACK (Technology, Pedagogy and Content Knowledge) model presents the three types of knowledge that are necessary to implement a successful technology-based educational activity. It highlights how the intersections between TPK (Technological Pedagogical Knowledge), PCK (Pedagogical Content Knowledge) and TCK (Technological Content Knowledge) are not a sheer sum up of their components but new types of knowledge. This paper focuses on TPK, the intersection between technology knowledge and pedagogy knowledge – a crucial field of investigation. Actually, technology in education is not just an add-on but is literally reshaping teaching/learning paradigms. Technology modifies pedagogy and pedagogy dictates requirements to technology. In order to pursue this research, an empirical approach was taken, building a repository (back-end) and a portal (front-end) of about 300 real-life educational experiences run at school. Educational portals are not new, but they generally emphasise content. Instead, in our portal, technology and pedagogy take centre stage. Experiences are classified according to more than 30 categories (‘facets’) and more than 200 facet values, all revolving around the pedagogical implementation and the technology used. The portal (an innovative piece of technology) supports sophisticated ‘exploratory’ sessions of use, targeted at researchers (investigating the TPK intersection), teachers (looking for inspiration in their daily jobs) and decision makers (making decisions about the introduction of technology into schools)

Model-Driven Generation of Collaborative Virtual Environments for Cultural Heritage

Collaborative Virtual Environments are experiencing a large interest in cultural heritage field mostly due to the strong opportunity given by novel augmented reality applications. There are already several examples of collaborative augmented visit to museums or historical sites. Anyway the traditional and static approach to computer graphics is very limiting because it often requires the development of a Virtual Environment for every new application. In this paper, we propose a technique for model-driven generation of mixed reality virtual environments, where every modification in contents, visit path and in interactions with the physical surrounding environment don’t require a great re-coding effort, enabling fast deployment of collaborative virtual environments for cultural explorations only providing new contents and a small set of parameters

Numero atteso di guasti e disponibilità dei sistemi, modello analitico di calcolo in condizioni di funzionamento reale dei componenti

Per condurre un’analisi attendibile di un sistema complesso è di norma opportuno ridurre quanto più possibile le approssimazioni e gli errori che si rischia di commettere nel calcolo del numero atteso di guasti e della disponibilità dei singoli componenti. A tale scopo si propone un modello che permette appunto di calcolare con maggiore precisione questi due parametri in condizioni di funzionamento reale dei componenti e relativamente al caso dei sistemi in serie. Per il calcolo del numero atteso di guasti di ogni componente è stata determinata una matrice con i parametri affidabilistici di tutti i componenti in serie, mentre la disponibilità è stata calcolata attraverso la valutazione del tempo di fuori servizio complessivo. Questa metodologia è diversa da quella tradizionale, che stima la disponibilità di un tale sistema come il prodotto delle disponibilità dei singoli componenti. I risultati del modello proposto sono stati confrontati con quelli della metodologia analitica tradizionale e con quelli di due software, uno commerciale (RAMP, Reliability Analysis and Manteinability of Process systems) e uno sviluppato in ambito accademico (MARA, Montecarlo Availability Reliability Analysis), entrambi basati sul metodo di Monte Carlo

Structuring Repositories of Educational Experiences: A Case Study

Until now, a large amount of effort has been spent on structuring educational repositories. During the years, standard formats to describe learning resources have been provided, reference content models to exchange them among repositories and between repositories and Learning Management Systems have been specified, large repositories have been deployed both from academia and from private organizations (as IEEE and ACM, for example). Researchers observe that open and widely available educational resources can significantly reduce the time required to prepare lectures; other authors argue that repositories facilitate education, combining different learning style theories with technology preferences. The focus is mainly on learning content. In this paper we give a different perspectives on repositories for education, having as a central point the educational experience. We report on a case study we are completing structuring a repository to collect credible evidence from Italian teachers who create innovation in schools using technology. We describe the technical issues we encountered developing an online repository of hundreds of experiences, carried out in classes of all levels of schooling, where technology was skillfully combined with pedagogical solutions to generate substantial educational benefits

Supply Chain Management meets Auto-ID Management: A Structured Approach

Nowadays, firms need to support e-business through solutions that guarantee, on the one hand, the supply chain management (SCM) and, on the other, products’ identification and traceability (ID automation). These two aspects have been faced, up until now, in a separate manner and adhered to the definition of established standards. Thus, we propose an approach that allows the integration of SCM and ID-automation software architectures and, at the same time, guarantees the separation of concerns. In this paper, we also present an implementation that uses two systems: the data interchange system based on the ebXML standard and the traceability system based on the EPCglobal standard. According to this approach, we propose a preliminary implementation experience for the pharmaceutical sector

Fast Prototyping of Learning Experiences: An Attempt of Modelling

There are already several examples of Enhanced Learning Management System (ELMS) that use 3D Virtual Worlds as a novel visual metaphor to catch the young student’s attention, to convey concepts and to develop their competences in a learning-by-doing and collaborative fashion. However, their main weak point is the lack of flexibility in the design of the virtual environment and in the customization of the learning experience. Moreover, the number of users potentially involved in each learning session, the variety of learning strategies and the amount of learning objects already available, require the ability of fast prototyping each virtual learning experience, generating, sometimes hundreds, of customized sessions starting from the same “general format”. The need to simplify the customization, open also to non-technical skilled people like teachers, have led us to focus the attention on the simplification of the authoring process of the learning experience and to develop OpenWebTalk, a general-purpose, flexible framework for the fast prototyping of collaborative 3D learning experiences that represents also a first approach to the structured modelling a learning session

Flexible 3D Collaborative Virtual Environment: WebTalk04

A Collaborative Virtual Environment, CVE, is a computer-based virtual space that supports collaborative work and social interplay. In a 3D CVE, a “hosting” 3D world is the necessary ingredient: within it, users, provided with graphical embodiments, called avatars, that convey their identity (presence, location, movement, ..) can meet and interact with other users, with agents, or with virtual objects. As we move increasingly to a networked world, and with the promise of increased and improved data-flow through broadband networks, we believe that collaborative virtual environments will be of increasing importance. Distributed teams engaged in collaborative task using CVEs are getting rather common in fields such as gaming, military, training, and engineering. In this paper we present WebTalk04, a general purpose, flexible, framework for building 3D CVEs: the need of generating a variety of applications has led to high degree of flexibility and configurability. An XML configuration, in fact, allows to easily control most of its advanced features (including collaborative functions). WebTalk04 is a framework (rather than a specific application), developed by a joint team (University of Lecce and Politecnico di Milano). It supports complex cooperation features that have been tested with hundreds of “direct users” and thousands of “indirect users” as it will be explained in the paper. The paper will describe the framework architecture, and will also describe how we use 3D networking technologies, to leverage collaboration between users (at different locations) that are working on the same learning task: thus creating blended, distributed e-Learning activities, and extending the current concept of e-Learning (today mainly perceived as “remote learning”)

Collaborative Learning through Flexible Web CVE: The Experience of WebTalk

This chapter describes the technological platform of the authors’ learning experiences and its evolution through the years, providing insights into the reasons that led to significant design choices and offering guidelines on how to deal with technological issues