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Industry 4.0 (I.4.0) has a significant impact on firms, supply chains and in contexts where firms have built tight relations with high levels of interactions in a delimited geographical area. An industrial district (ID) represents an extraordinary field for empirical investigation to understand how the knowledge linked to the I.4.0 technological paradigm can be absorbed and disseminated. However, the current literature has focused its attention on the effect of I.4.0 on the IDs at an aggregate level, while little is known about the role of the firms within the IDs. This research aims to fill this gap by looking at two dimensions: absorption and dissemination. We focused our attention on 101 firms belonging to four Tuscan IDs: the Santa Croce tanning district, the Florentine leather district, the Prato textile district and the Arezzo jewellery district. This research broadens the literature about absorption and dissemination within IDs enlightening the behaviour of firms in IDs, where they can play different roles: 'traditionalist', 'bridge', 'isolated' and 'opportunist'. From a practical perspective, this paper shows firms their role played within IDs. From this research it comes out that competencies 4.0, culture 4.0 and collaboration are the key aspects for turning IDs into IDs 4.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of reinforcement corrosion need to be included in the assessment of existing Reinforced Concrete structures for a reliable evaluation of the structural performances over time and a correct choice of the renovation strategy. The DEMSA protocol proposes straightforward tools available to professional engineers, enabling the calibration of equivalent damage parameters able to describe corrosion effects starting from environmental easy‐measurable conditions. Guidance to implement the equivalent damage parameters describing corrosion effects at a sectional level in the structural analyses is provided. Then, a simplified approach to model the corrosion attack distribution along the bar length is proposed. Finally, nonlinear static analyses are carried out on reference RC frames subjected to different corrosion patterns by adopting fiber modeling technique, to show how the equivalent damage parameters allow detecting the impact of corrosion effects on the structural performances, in terms of internal actions distribution, reduction of stiffness, strength, and ductility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]