Riccardo Manzini is a full professor of Logistics, Material Handling, and Facility Planning at Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, Italy. He is the director of the “Warehousing Center at UniBO”, which deals with all critical issues affecting the handling and storage of materials. He is a member of the core faculty of the international Bologna Business School – BBS at the Alma Mater Studiorum, teaching in some Executive Master and MBA programs.He works in industrial plants, logistics, maintenance, packaging, and agro-food. His research interests include material handling, storage and warehousing systems, supply chain optimization, digital twin and expert systems for logistics and operations, maintenance and reliability engineering, and food supply chain. He has coordinated several industrial research and technology transfer projects for private and public companies in the manufacturing sector, automation and robotics industry, packaging machinery industry, 3PL and 4PL, agro-food sector, etc.He is the author of more than 200 research manuscripts on the design, management, control, and optimization of production systems, emphasizing the development and application of models and methods to support the optimization of the decision-making process. He is the author of some international books, including for Springer “Warehousing in the Global Supply Chain” and “Maintenance for Industrial Systems”.Riccardo Accorsi is Associate Professor of Sustainable Operations and Logistics and Production Management and Optimization at Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna in the Department of Industrial Engineering. His research falls within the broad field of operations management and industrial logistic systems through the design and development of tailored Decision-Support Systems (DSS) and digital twins, optimization, simulation, machine learning techniques. His main research interests concern warehousing, material handlingand packaging systems and sustainable food supply chain networks. He is recipient of the 2018 Sustainability Young Investigator Award, and Principal Investigator and WP leader of funded National (PRIN – NEXTCART) and European (Horizon – R3PACK) Projects, respectively.He has a ten-years’ experience in consulting for numerous industrial applied research projects in 3PL, food, automotive, machinery, manufacturing, and packaging industries. He is author of more than 100 indexed publications and co-editor of two international books on Food Supply Chain design, planning and control.
