Search

Megaprojects are large-scale, complex initiatives that often encounter major disruptions during their life cycle. These disruptions have the potential to seriously impair the viability of the megaprojects. They may also cause severe damage to the economy in the region where they are emerging. To overcome disruptions, and to enhance their delivery performance, the strategic management concept of dynamic capabilities is being increasingly applied. In the context of megaproject owners, there is a need to understand what capabilities are required and how they are developed in the face of disruptions.Drawing upon longitudinal data over a period spanning 50 years for three megaprojects in the urban development (metro rail) domain, this study examines key disruptions that may influence the development of owner capabilities. Specifically, this study identifies four project capabilities: i) a strategic capability to continuously engage with, and manage external stakeholders, ii) a strategic capability to preserve value and transform the delivery process, iii) a governance capability to enhance organizational resilience, and iv) a commercial capability to manage knowledge and partnerships. Given that disruptions are repetitive in nature, owners would need these project capabilities to overcome disruptions.

Disruptions in the food supply chain are events that affect the flow of products and can be caused by extreme weather, natural disasters, conflicts, pandemics, and political situations, among others. These events can significantly impact food products' availability, quality, and cost, creating risks to the well-being of local populations and livelihoods. The specific literature on food supply chains needs to address other approaches to risk categorisation, which allow for establishing reference frameworks focused on the general classification of types of disruption and parameters related to solution methods. In this paper, we present a literature review to analyse the disruptions in the food supply chain. We classified 74 papers according to the types of disruptions, stakeholders, response level, supply chain echelon, solution methods, goals, and related considerations. The review results showed that the most common disruptions in the food supply chain are climatic, biological and environmental, logistics and infrastructure, and supply. The results of this review allow us to suggest some new research directions.

The Port serves as a pivotal intermodal (rail and road) and international nexus, seamlessly connecting land-sea transportation across a dense network of European markets. Different disruptions, primarily originating from external forces, profoundly influence its stakeholder engagement strategies, data digitization efforts, and the pursuit of sustainable transformation.This paper delineates how the Port employs foresight methodologies to effectively address these disruptions. Providing a contextual backdrop, the paper outlines the Authority’s origins, organizational structure, core objectives, operational mandates, and mechanisms of accountability. The paper elucidates the ramifications of these disruptions on initiatives related to digitalization, environmental sustainability, and stakeholder management, offering a comprehensive analysis of their implications.

Disruptions in public transit systems can have significant impacts on agency and passenger needs. Therefore, it is crucial to implement new transit policies to address these disruptions and to ensure efficient and reliable transit services. This study proposes a framework to assess alternative bus operating strategies to adapt with different disruptions to public transit systems. Conventional all-stop systems, visiting all the stops along a bus corridor, are compared against three alternative operational schemes: Skip-stop, express-local schemes with stop-skipping designs, and on-demand service with a fixed route but flexible stopping patterns, are compared to find the most efficient bus operating service under various circumstances. We developed an optimization model based on the total generalized system cost for each operating strategy using continuous approximation techniques and extended the previous models by comparing a wider range of alternative services and model flexibility to evaluate the optimum system in response to different disruptions. Different factors, such as the level of demand, demand patterns, and sensitivity to various components of transit trips for passengers and the operator, including crowding, denied boarding costs, and fleet constraints, are considered. We found that, given a different disruption scenario, demand, and travel patterns, the most efficient service can vary significantly between on-demand, all-stop, skip-stop, and express-local services. As such, it is suggested that the service scheme be chosen more adaptively by employing such frameworks.

Measles is a highly transmissible disease that requires high levels of vaccination coverage for control and elimination. Areas that are unable to achieve and maintain high coverage levels are at risk for measles outbreaks resulting in increased morbidity and mortality. Public health emergencies, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, pose a threat to the functioning of health systems by disrupting immunization services which can derail measles vaccination efforts. Efforts to bridge coverage gaps in immunization include the rapid return to fully functioning services as well as deploying supplementary immunization activities (SIAs), which are additional vaccination campaigns intended to catch-up children who have missed routine services. However, SIAs, which to date tend to be national efforts, can be difficult to mobilize quickly, resource-intensive, and even more challenging to deploy during a public health crisis. By mapping expected burden of measles, more effective SIAs that are setting-specific and resource-efficient can be planned and mobilized. Using a spatial transmission model of measles dynamics, we projected and estimated the expected burden of national and local measles outbreaks in Zambia with the current COVID-19 pandemic as a framework to inform disruptions to routine vaccination. We characterize the impact of disruptions to routine immunization services on measles incidence, map expected case burden, and explore SIA strategies to mitigate measles outbreaks. We find that disruptions lasting six months or longer as well as having low MCV1 coverage prior to disruptions resulted in an observable increase of measles cases across provinces. Targeting provinces at higher risk of measles outbreaks for SIAs is an effective strategy to curb measles virus incidence following disruptions to routine immunization services.

In the present work, the role of plasma facing components protection in driving the EU-DEMO design will be reviewed, focusing on steady-state and, especially, on transients. This work encompasses both the first wall (FW) as well as the divertor. In fact, while the ITER divertor heat removal technology has been adopted, the ITER FW concept has been shown in the past years to be inadequate for EU-DEMO. This is due to the higher foreseen irradiation damage level, which requires structural materials (like Eurofer) able to withstand more than 5 dpa of neutron damage. This solution, however, limits the tolerable steady-state heat flux to ~1 MW/m2, i.e. a factor 3–4 below the ITER specifications. For this reason, poloidally and toroidally discontinuous protection limiters are implemented in EU-DEMO. Their role consists in reducing the heat load on the FW due to charged particles, during steady state and, more importantly, during planned and off-normal plasma transients. Concerning the divertor configuration, EU-DEMO currently assumes an ITER-like, lower single null (LSN) divertor, with seeded impurities for the dissipation of the power. However, this concept has been shown by numerous simulations in the past years to be marginal during steady-state (where a detached divertor is necessary to maintain the heat flux below the technological limit and to avoid excessive erosion) and unable to withstand some relevant transients, such as large ELMs and accidental loss of detachment. Various concepts, deviating from the ITER design, are currently under investigation to mitigate such risks, for example in-vessel coils for strike point sweeping in case of reattachment, as well as alternative divertor configurations. Finally, a broader discussion on the impact of divertor protection on the overall machine design is presented.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought negative impacts to global supply chains, in particular to the agricultural sector. Although these companies have been developing programs to mitigate the impacts caused by COVID-19, researchers have been worried about a possible weakening of the adoption of sustainable initiatives due to a focus on dealing with the consequences of the pandemic. Grounded on the Resource Orchestration Theory, the goal of this study was to assess the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on sustainable (environmental, social, and economic) performance in the context of agri-food supply chains. To do so, a questionnaire survey was used to collect data from 349 different medium and large agri-food companies in Brazil. Data were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling-Partial Least Squares technique. This study has found out that, under the impacts arising from COVID-19 pandemic (1) supply management and transportation and logistics management had a positive impact on food supply chains' sustainable performance; (2) the effects of relationship management and supply chain wide impact management were found to be negative on sustainable performance; and (3) the effects of demand and production management on sustainable performance were not considered significant. We propose a framework that clearly represents the relationship between the disrupted supply chain areas and sustainable performance through the development of orchestration capabilities. By knowing which kinds of impacts produce the most significant effects on sustainable performance, policy makers and managers will be able to make decisions and take actions to avoid negative effects and to improve firms' sustainable performance., (© 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Measles is a highly transmissible disease that requires high levels of vaccination coverage for control and elimination. Areas that are unable to achieve and maintain high coverage levels are at risk for measles outbreaks resulting in increased morbidity and mortality. Public health emergencies, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, pose a threat to the functioning of health systems by disrupting immunization services which can derail measles vaccination efforts. Efforts to bridge coverage gaps in immunization include the rapid return to fully functioning services as well as deploying supplementary immunization activities (SIAs), which are additional vaccination campaigns intended to catch-up children who have missed routine services. However, SIAs, which to date tend to be national efforts, can be difficult to mobilize quickly, resource-intensive, and even more challenging to deploy during a public health crisis. By mapping expected burden of measles, more effective SIAs that are setting-specific and resource-efficient can be planned and mobilized. Using a spatial transmission model of measles dynamics, we projected and estimated the expected burden of national and local measles outbreaks in Zambia with the current COVID-19 pandemic as a framework to inform disruptions to routine vaccination. We characterize the impact of disruptions to routine immunization services on measles incidence, map expected case burden, and explore SIA strategies to mitigate measles outbreaks. We find that disruptions lasting six months or longer as well as having low MCV1 coverage prior to disruptions resulted in an observable increase of measles cases across provinces. Targeting provinces at higher risk of measles outbreaks for SIAs is an effective strategy to curb measles virus incidence following disruptions to routine immunization services., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest None. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has posed unprecedented challenges for fish trade worldwide. This study examines these challenges through an observation of China's fish import and export activities and a qualitative study on evolving policies in the first nine months of 2020. The results indicate that control measures responding to uncertainty regarding the source of the disease and transmission path, the pressing need for restriction of the movement of people and goods, and fear of a second wave of outbreaks have substantially disrupted fish trade. To meet these challenges, certain coping measures are adopted to offset negative effects in the short term. These measures indicate the government's pivotal role in stabilizing the supply chain and striking a balance between control requirements and efficiency required in trading activities, as well as the importance to find alternative markets to mitigate risks brought by the delayed supply and the plummeting consumption market. It concludes with some suggestions on improving international cooperation and domestic regulation for building resilience in long run., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare., (© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

In this paper, we respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by constructing supply chain network optimization models, which explicitly include labor as an important variable in the network economic activity links, along with associated capacities. Labor is a critical resource in supply chains from production to transportation, storage, and distribution. In a pandemic, the availability of labor for different supply chain network activities may be disrupted due to illness, fear of contagion, morbidity, necessity of social/physical distancing, etc. The modeling framework considers first elastic demands for a product and then fixed demands, coupled with distinct types of labor capacities in order to capture the availability of this valuable resource in a pandemic, as well as possible flexibility. The supply chain network framework, which includes electronic commerce, is relevant to many different supply chain applications including protective personal and medical equipment, as well as to particular food items. Theoretical results as well as computed numerical examples are presented., Competing Interests: None., (© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

I engage with the impact of disruptions on my work life, and consider the transformative potential that these disruptions offer. I focus on four parts of my life: as a researcher, teacher, administrator and editor. In each, I examine the nature of the disruption and the way I deal with it. I also consider how the present disruption may facilitate a transformation of current practices that lead to a better world at the individual and institutional levels. Rather than lamenting the inconvenience of a crisis, I prefer to celebrate the opportunity to do better., (© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)