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Among the relevant aspects of the family resemblance approach (FRA), our study focuses on the potential of the approach to elaborate on disciplinary identities in an interdisciplinary context, specifically regarding the interplay between physics and mathematics. We present and discuss how the FRA wheel can be used and intertwined with the framework of boundary objects and boundary crossing mechanisms (Akkerman & Bakker, Review of Educational Research, 81, 132–169, 2011), which is well-known in STEM education for dealing with interdisciplinarity. The role of the FRA discussed in the article is dual: both practical and theoretical. It is practical in that we show how its use, in combination with the Akkerman and Bakker framework, appears effective in fostering productive discussions among prospective teachers on disciplinary identities and interdisciplinarity in historical cases. It is theoretical in that the combination of the two frameworks provides the vocabulary to characterise the ‘ambiguous nature’ of interdisciplinarity: like boundaries, interdisciplinarity both separates disciplines, making their identities emerge, and connects them, fostering mechanisms of crossing and transgressing the boundaries. This empirical study reveals how the theoretical elaboration took advantage of the prospective teachers’ contributions. We initially presented the FRA to characterise disciplinary identities, but the prospective teachers highlighted its potential to characterise also the boundary zone and the dialogue between physics and mathematics. The data analysis showed that the combinination of the two frameworks shaped a complex learning space where there was room for very different epistemic demands of the prospective teachers: from those who feel better within the identity cores of the disciplines, to those who like to inhabit the boundary zone and others who like to re-shape boundary spaces and move dynamically across them.

The crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change in their perception and organization of time. This happened also, and mainly, within the educational institutions, where students and teachers had to rearrange their teaching/learning dynamics because of the forced education at a distance. In this paper, we present an exploratory qualitative study with secondary school students aimed to investigate how they were experiencing their learning during lockdown and how, in particular, learning of science contributed to rearranging their daily lifetime rituals. In order to design and carry out our investigation, we borrowed constructs coming from a research field rather unusual for science education: the field of sociology of time. The main result concerns the discovery of the potential of the dichotomy between alienation from time and time re-appropriation. The former is a construct elaborated by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa to describe the society of acceleration in the “era of future shock”. The latter represents an elaboration of the construct of appropriation that the authors had operationally defined, starting from Bakhtin’s original idea, to describe the nexus between physics learning and identity. Thanks to the elaboration of the notion of time re-appropriation as feature of the “era of present shock”, the study unveils how school science, instead of preparing the young to navigate our fast-changing and complex society, tends to create “bubbles of rituals” that detach learning from societal concern.

Human integration in cyber-physical systems (CPS) is playing a crucial role in the era of the digital transformation, notably because humans are seen as the most flexible driver in an automated system. Two main reference models for human activities in production systems are usually considered, namely Human-in-the-Loop (HitL) and Human-in-the-Mesh (HitM), which present different requirements and challenges. This paper aims to overview the different activities related to the human integration in CPS, particularly discussing the requirements that can be found in HitL and HitM models for the different phases of the decision-making process, namely detect, determine, develop and describe; and analyzing the technologies and computational tools to support these human activities. The human integration in CPS is illustrated through three examples, where humans playing the operator and manager roles are integrated in the PERFoRM and FAR-EDGE ecosystems, covering different phases of the decision-making process. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Over the last years, several technologies and control systems have been developed towards the decentralization of automation control architectures for cyber-physical production systems. Nevertheless, only few of these technologies are already in use. To support their adoption in brownfield production sites migration strategies and business case evaluations are necessary. This paper presents a migration approach and a business case evaluation methodology tailored to the migration of legacy automation systems towards the Industry 4.0 paradigm. The proposed approach aims to evaluate opportunities and mitigate the risks of migration from technical, operational, human and business perspectives. The methodology follows an iterative approach starting from the definition of the current situation of the factory and the identification of business goals aiming at evaluating a set of possible migration paths and selecting the optimal one according to a cost-benefit analysis. The paper concludes with an exemplary application of the methodology in a real industrial environment, developed within the FAR-EDGE European Project.

The EU-project I SEE aims at facing young’s difficulties in imagining their future from the perspective of STEM education, assuming that STEM disciplines provide both epistemological and technical tools to deal with cross-cutting and societally relevant topics and to scaffold students’ approaches to the future. Within the project, the Italian community designed and implemented an interdisciplinary module on Artificial Intelligence for high school students. The data analysis revealed that the students were intellectually and emotionally engaged by the richness and the interdisciplinarity of this module, which encouraged them to become agents in the present in order to face future challenges.

Industry 4.0 implies the digitization of the shopfloor combining technologies such as sensors, augmented reality, and wearable robots that transform the manufacturing environment into a workplace where human-machine interactive symbiosis. As manufacturing companies develop strategies to innovate and engage with the digital transformation, the reality of the enabling technologies demonstrate serious challenges to the wider organizational adoption beyond the pilot phase albeit the promising evaluation results. This paper presents two cases based on two European research projects encompassing representatives of different industrial sectors and distils the challenges encountered that raise barriers to wider adoption.

How can physics teaching contribute to developing competencies for pushing imagination forward and to manage, rationally and emotionally, students’ uncertainty about the future? In this talk, we address this question by presenting a teaching module on climate change that has been designed to develop what we termed “future-scaffolding skills.” The notion includes concepts that came from the science of complex systems and that can be turned into abilities to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one’s eye on the horizon. We refer, for example, to the concepts of "space of possibilities," "future scenarios," "projection instead of deterministic prediction," “feedback and circular causality.” Our notion of “future-scaffolding skills” includes also transversal skills that labour market requires and that, meanwhile, can support students to push imagination toward the future. Futurescaffolding skills include, for example: strategic thinking and planning, risk taking, possibilities thinking, managing uncertainty, creative thinking, modelling and argumentation. In the talk, we will present the module, as well as the pilot study we carried out to test if the module effectively impacted students’ views of future. The study has been carried out in a class of 24 students (17 years old) from a scientifically-oriented secondary school in Italy (grade 12). The main result concerns the change in the perception of future that students’ discourse reveals: from far and unimaginable, it became thinkable as a bunch of possibilities, addressable through concrete actions and at their reach, in the sense that they found room to see themselves agents of their own future. The positive results inspired the Erasmus + Project “I SEE – Inclusive STEM education to Enhance the capacity to aspire and to imagine future careers”, that started in September 2016 and involves 7 partners from 4 different countries.

In the highly competitive modern-day industrial landscape, characterized by globalization and resource scarcity, manufacturers are striving to improve economic and environmental performance. Innovation that enables self-adjustment, control and optimization of the energy consumption of individual machines continues. However, more research is needed if such systems are to be deployed successfully, especially considering the complex characteristics of the energy flows in the factory. In this paper we propose a novel approach to the coordination of information, processing and sensing systems for energy and resource efficient production systems. By leveraging on a recently-developed framework focusing on physical flows of energy, materials and waste we propose a solution based on specific energy efficiency KPIs and an online data acquisition/processing system, that enables real-time monitoring of the current status of the machining process and lagging assessment of system energy efficiency. The proposed solution allows the identification of abnormal energy consumption during the operational machine cycle, caused by incorrect part dimensioning or erroneous cutting conditions programmed by the process engineer, enabling identification of potential disruptions with different gravity levels, and delivery of meaningful alarms for the operator. Adaptive control of the machine cutting conditions or even trajectory re-programming is then possible, by correlating the energy-consumption data with other data, such as head temperature. Furthermore, by analysing the energy consumption of value and non value adding activities over complete production cycles (such as a shift or day), it is possible to monitor the progress of production systems toward achieving energy efficiency targets and to conduct root-cause analysis of inefficient energy usage for continuous improvement programs. We tested the proposed solution, modeling, index system ad online data acquisition/processing platform, through an industrial case study by deploying the developed hardware and software modules on a Nicolas Correa S.A. VERSA milling machine.

The Industry 4.0 vision, grounded on the integration of key technologies and Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPSs), is expected to profoundly modify the manufacturing sector. There is large consensus on the fact that work will change and different skills will be needed. However, whether the organization of work will evolve towards higher responsibility and decision-making of the employees or towards higher technological control is still an open question. The challenge is how to govern this evolution and purposely guide the process of integrating people within CPSs in order to move towards the desired scenario. This paper addresses this challenge, by proposing a methodology to support the design and assessment of different work configurations, jointly considering the uniqueness of human labour and the characteristics of cyber-physical production within a comprehensive framework. The method covers ordinary production as well as irregular scenarios, such as failure detection or maintenance intervention, particularly interesting for human work. The applicability of the method is illustrated through two industrial cases, leading to suggestions for training the personnel and for enhancing the whole cyber- physical-social system. Results include human-centric Key Performance indicators (KPIs) and general guidelines for work design. The approach encourages managers and engineers to clarify their strategy for human resources; develops a multi-perspective awareness on the role of workers; fosters an early detection of possible misalignment between the high-level strategies and the technical interventions on the shop floor. The modelling, analysis and assessment technique developed aims at representing a first step towards formal and quantitative methods to support the design of human work integrated within cyber-physical-systems.

Collaborative robots, thanks to their light structure and embedded safety mechanisms, have started to be employed in assembly lines to perform tasks previously carried out by human operators. The implications of the close and sometimes tight collaboration between the worker and the machine have been investigated from several perspectives: quality, productivity, health & safety and social implications. However, other implications, which are acquiring increasing relevance, are related to product changeovers and the need to frequently adapt the collaborative robots’ behaviour to follow the new work instructions. As current market trends lead to increasingly frequent releases of new models or variants, the capability to adapt robot’s instructions effectively and efficiently have to be at hand in the line and cannot longer be limited to the engineering and technical departments. Theory and practice about changing robots’ programs have to be transferred from the experts to the operators. In this study, we propose a method for capturing and analyzing expert’s knowledge, based on human observation, video and speech recording. Results include patterns of human expert’s behaviour and suggestions for training and support employees to cope with collaborative robots and new product introduction.

In science education, the influence that students’ identities have on learning appears a rather familiar focus. However, the inverse question of how disciplinary content learning can be a vehicle for identity formation is little explored. In the contribution, the authors focus on this direction and pursue this agenda by operationally defining a theoretical construct, appropriation. In particular, they first explore how the construct of appropriation sheds light on the process by which content knowledge learning influences identity development. The authors then use appropriation to develop some nuance related to the notion of concept projection from coordination class theory, a well-known perspective within the landscape of theoretical approaches on conceptual change.

Industry 4.0 is at the center of the current debate among manufacturing leaders, industrial practitioners, policy makers and researchers. Despite the increasing attention paid to changes in jobs and skills generated by Industry 4.0, research in this domain is still scarce. Our study focuses on the evolution of technical skills in the context of Industry 4.0 and it provides qualitative insights gained from an on-going collaborative research project involving a variety of manufacturing stakeholders in Northern Italy (e.g., manufacturing companies, industrial associations, academic and education experts, recruiting companies, IT providers, consultants, etc.). Our findings contributes to shed light on manufacturing skill needs linked to Industry 4.0, setting the stage for future research on the topic and providing companies, policy makers and education stakeholders with first indications to detect skill gaps and initiate competence development.

The manufacturing industry is one of the major employers on a global scale and the increasing population of robots has the potential to influence the number of human jobs. The effect of robotization has been analyzed from the industrial, social and economic perspectives. Several economic models have been developed to explain the conditions for human substitutions. In this paper we propose the adoption of the predator-prey framework and find it suggestive that the behavior of two populations apparently competing but surely cooperating in view of a common goal may be roughly assimilated to the biological interplay among natural species that was nicely introduced by Lotka and Volterra ninety years ago.

Industrial competitiveness today means shorter product lifecycles, increased product variety and shorter time-to-market. To face this challenge, the manufacturing industry is forced by different initiatives, namely Internet of Things, Industrie 4.0 and Cyber-Physical System to move from traditional control approaches towards intelligent manufacturing control systems that are dynamically adaptable to changing production environment and flexible to different processing tasks. For years several emergent intelligent approaches such as Multi-Agent Systems, Service-oriented Architecture, Plug-and-Produce systems and Cloud technologies have been developed in a variety of research fields. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art methodologies and technologies of flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing systems outlining the differences between them and arising benefits within the vision of the PERFoRM (Production harmonizEd Reconfiguration of Flexible Robots and Machinery) project. Current trends and challenges in industrial implementation of these methodologies are reported and research opportunities are described.

In Industry 4.0 the optimal allocation of a pool of available workers is a very important issue. Solving this problem can improve the performance of the company and the life of workers with positive returns on productivity. Moreover, from a computational perspective, this problem is extremely interesting because it could have a combinatorial explosion and become very hard to solve. In this paper, a mathematical model applied to a real business case is presented. Some preliminary tests and results are discussed.

The paper discusses teaching materials on thermodynamics, designed and implemented in 5 classes of scientifically-oriented secondary schools in Italy (grade 12). The materials are designed to: i) foster conceptual understanding; ii) create a learning environment rich enough to enable each student to find a personal way for appropriating content knowledge. In order to achieve the first aim, the design takes into account the main results of literature about student's difficulties in thermodynamics. In order to achieve the second aim, forms of “productive complexities” are implemented. The paper presents the design criteria and shows why they have the potential to create an inclusive and creative learning environment.

This paper concerns the analysis of data collected during the implementation of a teaching proposal on thermodynamics in a class of 20 students (17 year-olds) of a scientifically-oriented secondary school in Italy. After a brief presentation of the teaching proposal design and of the notion of learning environment as properly complex territory, the results of two levels of analysis are discussed. The first level regards a phenomenological (bottom-up) analysis of a selection of individual interviews to students. The analysis allowed us: i) to reconstruct how different students approached the study of thermodynamics; ii) to show in what sense we can infer, in the words of Confrey, that the teaching activities have shaped a “classroom corridor” that the students were enabled to navigate by constructing “individual trajectories” (Confrey, 2006). The second level of analysis regards the development of a “humble, or local, theory” (diSessa, Cobb, 2004; Levrini, diSessa, 2008) aimed at explaining why and how a specific interplay between the collective and individual dynamics fosters and supports the construction of personal learning trajectories. Such a humble theory is comprised of: - an agent stimulating and supporting students’ in their construction of trajectories - the imaginative game put in action by the students and represented by the circularity between i) recognizing a space of possibilities for developing thinking, ii) anticipating where the various possible paths can lead, iii) testing the possibilities against reality (reification); - boundary conditions – classroom norms (trust in teacher and an acknowledged and productive role that the students were encouraged to play within the classroom) and being in their regime of competence; - a dynamical mechanism lying at the back of the process – the specific action of mediation operated by the teacher in order to manage the collective time and to tune the individual cognition, the collective dynamics and the discipline. The specific example of humble theory will provide the basis for addressing methodological issues raised by the Design Studies (Cobb et al., 2003) and concerning the development of theories in Physics Education Research. References: Confrey, J., (2006). The evolution of design studies as methodology, in Sawyer K. (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of The Learning Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 135 – 152. Cobb, P., Confrey, J., diSessa A., Lehrer, R., Schauble, L. (2003). Design Experiments in Educational Research, Educational Researcher, 32 (1), 9-13. diSessa, A. A., Cobb, P. (2004). Ontological innovation and the role of theory in design experiments. The J. of Learning Sciences, 13(1), 77-103. Levrini, O., diSessa, A A., (2008). How Students Learn from Multiple Contexts and Definitions: Proper Time as a Coordination Class. Phys. Rev. STPER, 4, 010107-1-18.

The overarching goal of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the interplay between students’ disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and identity. Appropriation implies productive learning including deep conceptual understanding, but it also involves a reflexive process of populating scientific discourse with personal intentions, purposes and tastes that allow a student to embody scientific discourse and concepts in a way that is authentic and personal. The core aim of this paper is to transform the term appropriation into a theoretical construct by means of an analytic process of defining, operationalizing and testing the definition against student interview and classroom data. Five discourse markers for operationalizing the construct of appropriation were discovered through this process. Appropriation, in our study, implies students’ discourse is (1) an expression of a personal “signature” ideas, (2) grounded in the discipline, (3) thick, in that it involves a metacognitive and epistemological dimension, (4) non-incidental, in the sense of being consistently used throughout classroom activities and (5) a carrier of social relationships, in that it positions the student within the classroom community. The study is grounded in data from an extended intervention on thermodynamics in a class of 20 students (17 years old) from a scientifically-oriented secondary school in Italy (grade 12). The goal of this article is to contribute to understanding the interplay between students' disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and identity. Appropriation implies deep conceptual understanding, but it also involves a reflexive process of transforming scientific discourse in a way that is authentic and personal. The core aim of this article is to turn the term appropriation into a theoretical construct by means of an analytic process of defining, operationalizing, and testing the definition against student interview and classroom data. Five discourse markers for operationalizing appropriation were discovered through this process. Appropriation, in our study, implies students’ discourse is (A) an expression of a personal “signature“ idea, (B) grounded in the discipline, (C) thick, in that it involves a metacognitive and epistemological dimension, (D) non-incidental, in the sense of being consistently used throughout classroom activities, and (E) a carrier of social relationships, in that it positions the student within classroom. The study is grounded in an extended intervention on thermodynamics in an Italian secondary school class (grade 12).

This paper provides an overview of the EU project SO SMART (Socially Sustainable Manufacturing for the Factories of the Future), a coordinated support action (CSA) project. SO SMART examined the conditions in Europe for creating socially sustainable workplaces in the manufacturing sector, where factories flourish along with their social environment. The project was international (with partners from five countries), multidisciplinary and participatory, involving participation of several science domain experts and a wider community of academic and industry beneficiaries who participated in panels, workshops, conference events and an online forum created specifically for the project.

Objective Latex allergy remains a significant problem, expecially among certain professional categories, and specific immunotherapy has been suggested as a suitable therapeutic option. The objective of the this article is to review the available literature on clinical trials of specific immunotherapy in latex allergy. Data Sources Literature databases (PubMed, Embase, Google Scholar) were searched for latex immunotherapy clinical trials. Study Selections Clinical trials (either open or randomized controlled) using subcutaneous or sublingual immunotherapy with latex extracts were selected. Only articles published in English in peer-reviewed journals were considered. Case reports quoted in the clinical trials were also described, when pertinent. Results Eleven clinical trials (3 with subcutaneous and 8 with sublingual immunotherapy) were identified. Two of the 3 randomized trials of subcutaneous immunotherapy reported some benefit in adults but a remarkable occurrence of side effects. Concerning sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT), there were 6 randomized placebo-controlled (1 in children), 1 randomized open, and 1 open trials. All but 1 trial reported positive results, and the safety profile was overall superior to injection immunotherapy. The overall quality of the study was moderate, and the number of subjects studied was low. Conclusion Although guidelines do not consider allergy to latex as an accepted indication to desensitization, SLIT can be offered, in addition to symptomatic treatment, to selected patients, when avoidance measures are not feasible or effective.

Our understanding of the interplay between product-services and social sustainability is still very limited. This paper sheds light on the interconnections between social sustainability and product-services throughout their life-cycle, and identifies a set of common topics and practices to be investigated by experts of Advances in Production Management Systems. In doing so, the paper sets the stage for future efforts aimed at exploiting the opportunities identified and exploring new synergies between product-services and social sustainability.

Part 1: Knowledge-Based Sustainability; International audience; Sustainable manufacturing has been extensively researched in the last decades, however there is a lack of coherence in literature specifically addressing its social dimension. Within the framework of the Social Sustainability-themed project SO SMART (Socially Sustainable Manufacturing for the Factories of the Future), a preliminary explorative survey and interview study were deployed among manufacturing companies and their stakeholders in Europe to investigate the extent to which they understand and practice social sustainability in relation to their business activities and context. Using an inquiry approach based on the main concepts related to social sustainability found in literature, this paper reports findings on preliminary exploration of the European landscape of social sustainability-related practices from a corporate and societal perspective. Findings contribute to the creation of a basis of shared knowledge as a prerequisite for extending and further developing concepts and models for socially sustainable manufacturing ecosystems.

Growing global competition, environmental concerns, legal and market requirements motivate production companies to strengthen their capability to monitor and control their factories. SCADA, MES, ERP and EAI provide limited and fragmented awareness on the behavior and performance of the manufacturing systems from the production, economic and environmental perspective. The introduction of wired or wireless sensor networks increases the available information for improved control, anomaly detection and condition monitoring on a local scale or with reference to specific systems. This paper presents a proposal for a holistic environmental conscious perspective of the factory, enabling identification and minimization of inefficiencies in the use of energy and resources, control of the environmental impact and maximization of manufacturing and economic performances.

Royal jelly has been demonstrated to have several physiological activities. However, in the literature, different reactions induced by royal jelly are reported. We describe a case of seven-year-old child that was referred to our observation for two episodes of oral allergy syndrome (OAS) that appeared ten minutes after ingestion of royal jelly. Skin prick test with standard panel of inhalant and food allergens, a prick-to-prick test using the royal jelly’s extract responsible for patient’s reactions, and royal jelly patch test with extemporaneous preparation were performed. The specific IgE by ImmunoCAP System method versus Hymenoptera venom, inhalant allergens, food allergens, and lipid transfer proteins was dosed. According to the positive reactions to royal jelly both by prick-by-prick test and by a first reading patch test, royal jelly immediate hypersensitivity was diagnosed. According to the positive response for almond in both in vivo and in vitro tests we can think of the royal jelly contamination with almond pollen as possible cause of patient’s reaction. Moreover, from the results of specific IgE titers versus Compositae pollens, we have argued the possibility that this case of royal jelly allergy could be explained also by the mechanism of cross-reaction with Compositae pollens.

The notion of social sustainability has been developed aiming at global growth. Policy makers have elaborated on this concept at regional and country level. Institutions and associations representing the scientific and technological environment have proposed their visions. Enterprises have adopted Corporate Social Responsibility practices. In this context, the role of manufacturing may have appeared so far limited to the specific aspects related to the workplaces. However, a broader perspective can lead to an extended awareness on how manufacturing can contribute to the social sustainability.

This paper aims at supporting the claim that some forms of hyper-simplification, by making physics seem easy, are at risk of dangerously distorting the content as well as the process of learning physics. The paper presents examples of dangerous simplifications in the teaching of quantum physics. Then, examples of productive forms of complexity are discussed, both as criteria for designing teaching proposals, and for realizing appropriate learning environments, namely properly complex territories. Empirical results, from a teaching/learning experiment on quantum physics at upper secondary school (grade 13), are reported. These results show examples of students’ reactions to travelling through a complex territory, and allow us to argue that unavoidable difficulty in learning quantum physics can be transformed into cultural challenges within reach of secondary school students.

In the current competitive and regulated landscape, manufacturing enterprises struggle to improve their performances, encompassing environmental as well as economic objectives, towards sustainable manufacturing and the future Eco-factories. Experts and scholars have developed more and more indicators, usually referred to as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), as a mean for steering and controlling the complex factory systems, characterized by dynamic interdependencies among different subsystems and external variables. The present study proposes a synthetic framework to bring back hundreds of environmental and economic KPIs to a few sound intuitive categories, in order to reduce duplications, recuperate meaningfulness and consciousness, facilitate inter and intra-organizational benchmarking. The approach, based on input-output modelling of physical flows (products, materials, energy, emissions, etc.) in manufacturing systems, can be used at different hierarchical levels in the plant and in different factory life-cycle phases (design, operations and re-design). The application of the framework is demonstrated on an extensive review of performance indicators gathered in industrial cases and in the literature.

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are expected to shape the evolution of production towards the fourth industrial revolution named Industry 4.0. The increasing integration of manufacturing processes and the strengthening of the autonomous capabilities of manufacturing systems make investigating the role of humans a primary research objective in view of emerging social and demographic megatrends. Understanding how the employees can be better integrated to enable increased flexibility in manufacturing systems is a prerequisite to allow technological solutions, as well as humans, to harness their full potential. Humans can supervise and adjust the settings, be a source of knowledge and competences, can diagnose situations, take decisions and several other activities influencing manufacturing performances, overall providing additional degrees of freedom to the systems. This paper, studies two different integration models: Human-in-the-Loop and Human-in-the-Mesh. They are both analysed in the context of four industrial cases of deployment of cyber physical systems in production.

Drug induced exfoliative dermatitis (ED) are a group of rare and severe drug hypersensitivity reactions (DHR) involving skin and usually occurring from days to several weeks after drug exposure. Erythema multiforme (EM), Stevens–Johnson syndrome (SJS) and toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) are the main clinical presentations of drug induced ED. Overall, T cells are the central player of these immune-mediated drug reactions. Here we provide a systematic review on frequency, risk factors, pathogenesis, clinical features and management of patients with drug induced ED. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12948-016-0045-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Intentional birefringence induces an excess loss on one of the two polarization states of a single-mode optical fiber. Yet it may be not sufficient to avoid polarization coupling completely. In this case, we have some undesired effects, such as excess attenuation of the desired polarization as well, finite value of the extinction ratio, and residual polarization dispersion. Such effects are investigated through a coupled power model, which leads to completely analytical results.