The Architecture of Chemical Alternatives Assessment

Chemical alternatives assessment is a method rapidly developing for use by businesses, governments, and nongovernment organizations seeking to substitute chemicals of concern in production processes and products. Chemical alternatives assessment is defined as a process for identifying, comparing, and selecting safer alternatives to chemicals of concern (including those in materials, processes, or technologies) on the basis of their hazards, performance, and economic viability. The process is intended to provide guidance for assuring that chemicals of concern are replaced with safer alternatives that are not likely to be later regretted. Conceptually, the assessment methods are developed from a set of three foundational pillars and five common principles. Based on a number of emerging alternatives assessment initiatives, in this commentary, we outline a chemical alternatives assessment blueprint structured around three broad steps: Scope, Assessment, and Selection and Implementation. Specific tasks and tools are identified for each of these three steps. While it is recognized that on‐going practice will further refine and develop the method and tools, it is important that the structure of the assessment process remain flexible, adaptive, and focused on the substitution of chemicals of concern with safer alternatives.     

Family and Child Welfare Reconsidered

In the issue's final essay, Douglas J. Besharov and Peter H. Rossi summarize the major findings of this issue. The main sources of data they discuss, besides the essays in this issue, are the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the National Survey of America's Families (NSAF), the Survey of Program Dynamics (SPD), the Project on Devolution and Urban Change (UC), and the Child Impact Waiver Experiments.     

Improving productivity of automated tissue converting lines: an empirical model and a case study

This study is focused on minor stoppages as sources of variance within automated production lines in industrial environments, and it suggests the handling of the problem through a combined phenomenon–mechanism analysis and simulation approach. The resulting seven-step methodological pattern has been applied to a real-life case study of a tissue converting line: the product type and the machine speed have been identified as causal factors for minor stoppages and the wrapper machine has been chosen to exemplify the methodology.

Results point out that the speed of the wrapping machine–which allows the daily throughput of line to be maximized–changes when products change, thus highlighting a trade off between minor stoppages and wrapper speed. However, in some other cases, minor stoppages are more detrimental than the machine speed is useful.     

Linking hybrid systems to ACD models: a case study in the fibre-glass industry

This paper is aimed at formalising and testing a model for hybrid systems where the interactions between the continuous process parts and the manufacturing sub-systems are given by minor stoppages. The proposed approach consists in representing the effects of the continuous process dynamics on discrete manufacturing sub-systems by means of autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) models originally conceived to treat high-frequency and irregularly spaced financial transaction data. The model has been applied to a real-life furnace and spooling-bushing department system of a fibre-glass production plant. Results conclude that the ACD-based model proved useful for representing the occurrence of fibre-glass breakage on the spooling-bushing machines and, in more general terms, that the proposed methodology could be really suitable for the logical modelling of the hybrid production systems where the relationships between the continuous and the discrete parts are given by the occurrence of minor stoppages.     

Book reviews

This paper is aimed at developing and testing a methodology to evaluate the most appropriate collaboration level within a given supply chain. In particular, the proposed methodology is conceived for logistic networks belonging to the consumer packaged goods industry, e.g. the grocery industry, and it consists of: (i) identifying an approximation of collaboration, (ii) representing through such approximation the different options among collaborative planning forecasting and replenishment (CPFR), vendor management inventory (VMI) and loosely collaborative approach (LCA); (iii) using a simulation-based decision support system to select the best collaboration level. The proposed methodology has been applied to a real-life supply chain in the food and beverage industry. Results conclude that the methodology proposed here proved useful in facing the problem of collaboration level definition among the nodes of a consumer packaged goods logistic network.     

Family,Social Capital and Family Associations

Social capital (SC) is a concept variedly defined and object today of great attention at an international level: it concerns trust among people, the ability to activate nets, solidarity, and civic engagement in the public sphere.

The SC constitutive character makes it producible only in original and fundamental relationships (in primis the family), where trust is developed and the code of solidarity is current.

Nevertheless, the increasing fragmentation and individualization of the family seem to consume SC, rather than to increase it. This leads to the question about the nature of SC today as constituted by the family. Some phenomena, for example family associationism, show that the family is still a patrimony irrefutable for social life: when families constitute family associations, they produce primary and secondary SC.