Abstract
Urban freight transport is an important enabling factor for economic growth and social activities in cities but despite its benefits, it also generates important negative externalities including traffic congestion, pollution, noise and overall less safety. Moreover, increased limitations on urban freight transport, including access constraints, limited kerbside and private parking spaces for loading/unloading, and the often prohibitive costs of installing logistics infrastructures in city centres, have further constrained urban freight transport. To address these issues, several city logistics solutions have been proposed, such as two-tier distribution systems and distribution systems based on mobile depots. In this paper, we focus on two-tier urban freight distribution systems based on mobile depots, where little or no physical infrastructure is considered and where storage is not permitted at transfer locations. In these types of systems, coordination and synchronisation between vehicles are essential, and the main objective is to have vehicles at the transfer locations in a need-to-be basis as a way of minimising the negative externalities. We review and analyse 13 cases found in the scientific literature, trial reports and online resources, and propose a classification of these systems based on the level of mobility and accessibility of transportation modes operating at the first-tier. Furthermore, we characterise the main components and operational features of the different systems, including the existence of multi-trips, the types of transport modes used at both tiers, transported loads and the organisation of the transfer sites (satellites). This work aims to contribute for a clearer characterisation of two-tier urban distribution systems based on mobile depots, to later support the development of the most adequate mathematical models and solution methods to be applied to each variant of this type of systems. © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

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Firms recognize that an assertive SCM could lead to an important competitive advantage in the business world. The purpose of this study is to capture the effect of supply chain management practices in the performance of firms, through a meta-analysis. It aims at highlighting which SCM practices that have a superior effect and their positive or negative impact on performance. Partnership with suppliers, process driven events, employee involvement, and customer satisfaction are the SCM practices that proved to have a positive impact in firm performance, according to the meta-analysis results. The findings from the research can help managers deciding on in which SCM practices concentrate their effort. It also allows making comparisons among different regions in terms of practices with a positive effect and how SCM practices evolves since first insights to now and if it changes throughout time. Concerning supply chain theories, this research sustains the hypotheses that SCM practices impact on some firm performance measures.

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As researchers are increasingly seeking tools and specialized support to perform research data management activities, the collaboration with data curators can be fruitful. Yet, establishing a timely collaboration between researchers and data curators, grounded in sound communication, is often demanding. In this paper we propose manual content analysis as an approach to streamline the data curator workflow. With content analysis curators can obtain domain-specific concepts used to describe experimental configurations in scientific publications, to make it easier for researchers to understand the notion of metadata and for the development of metadata tools. We present three case studies from experimental domains, one related to sustainable chemistry, one to photovoltaic generation and another to nanoparticle synthesis. The curator started by performing content analysis in research publications, proceeded to create a metadata template based on the extracted concepts, and then interacted with researchers. The approach was validated by the researchers with a high rate of accepted concepts, 84 per cent. Researchers also provide feedback on how to improve some proposed descriptors. Content analysis has the potential to be a practical, proactive task, which can be extended to multiple experimental domains and bridge the communication gap between curators and researchers. [This paper is a conference pre-print presented at IDCC 2020 after lightweight peer review.]

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