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The fusion energy research in Europe is developed by a set of laboratories of different countries and organisations. EFDA is an organisation whose main objective is to promote and improve the coordination and collaboration among these laboratories. This paper sets out to describe a working federation (EFDA‐Fed) that gathers EFDA (as organisation) and a set of fusion research laboratories: EURATOM/CIEMAT (Spain), CEA (France), JET (UK), IST (Portugal) and KFKI/HAS (Hungary).

To achieve the objective a federation among all the organisations has been implemented based on PAPI as the authentication and authorization infrastructure that provides a security layer for accessing data among organisations.

During the implementation of EFDA federation some improvements in distributed single sign on systems have been achieved such as the integration of JAVA applications and a single sign off mechanism.

Users who belong to one of the federated organisations will be able to access from any IP address to resources located in any organisation of the federation in a secure way. On the other hand, new resources can be shared for federated users and access policies to these services can be implemented.

The paper describes a successful use of an open source technology (PAPI) for implementing a real multi‐organisation infrastructure for sharing services in a secure way, and integrating client applications and with a complete single sign off mechanism.

The work deals with the topic of spare parts management in a space system. The paper is divided into three parts. The first one is dedicated to the characterization of the system structure and presents the particularities related to the spare‐elements procurement. Modelling is the object of the second part. After having exposed the bases of the problem to be solved, a macro‐model is introduced. Each of the three elements of an orbital system, namely ground, flying and transport, is then described with a Petri net. Operation specificities of every element are then listed and integrated into the model. A concrete application of this modelling is given in the last part. It concerns the Columbus laboratory of the International Space Station. A representative function is selected and several supply strategies are evaluated.

The purpose of this paper is to review, discuss and further develop the production assurance (PA) concept; and to define and describe a typical production assurance program (PAP) and its elements.

An explorative literature study covering PA and dependability concept was carried out on contemporary literature. During the course of the study, meetings and discussions with a number of experts in Sweden and Norway were performed. Different types of data and examples from the oil and gas industries are used to illustrate and support the discussions.

This paper indicates that the concept of PA helps the decision maker to estimate whether a production plant is able to meet customer requirements, as it provides information about the production plant's delivery capacity, production rate and ability to deliver according to design or customer demands. PAP can provide a basis for effective production control.

The material analysed was mainly related to the oil and gas industry. However, the findings and discussion can be transferred to other areas of application, such as mine production plants and chemical process plants.

A PAP is a valuable tool for production plant managers and engineers, not only for documenting a production plant's performance, but also for providing decision support for the development and optimization of the production plant to improve the plant's performance and reduce risk and uncertainties.

In this paper the concept of dependability is extended to include capacity performance and customer requirements or market demand, which provides a measure for delivery assurance or plant production performance in relation to customer requirements. This paper also develops a generic PAP to achieve a high level of delivery assurance.

The purpose of this paper is to check the consistency of the IEC 61508 standard formula related to the average failure frequency (PFH: the probability of dangerous failure per hour) for a commonly used safety instrumented system (SIS) architecture in the process industry: 2-out-of-3 voting (2oo3), also known as Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR).

IEC 61508 standard provided PFH formulas for different SIS architectures, without explanations, assuming that the SIS puts the equipment under control into a safe state on the detection of dangerous failure. This assumption renders the use of classical reliability approaches such as fault trees and reliability block diagrams impractical for PFH calculation. That said, the consistency verification was performed thanks to a dynamic and flexible reliability approach, namely Markov chains following these steps: (1) developing the multi-phase Markov chains (MPMC) model for 2oo3 configuration, (2) deducing the related classical Markov chains (CMC) model and (3) deriving a new PFH formula for the 2oo3 architecture based on the CMC model and thoroughly comparing it to that given in the IEC 61508. Moreover, 2oo3 architecture has been modeled through Petri nets for numerical comparison purposes. That comparison has been carried out between the numerical results obtained from IEC 61508 formula, the newly derived formula, Markov chains and Petri nets models.

The newly obtained formula for 2oo3 configuration contains extra terms compared with the IEC 61508 one. Therefore, this latter formula induces an underestimated PFH results, which is dangerous from a safety point of view. This fact was corroborated by the numerical comparison.

This paper does not consider the different configurations given in IEC 61508.

In our knowledge, no verification works have been conducted before on the IEC 61508 PFH formulas with shutdown capability. Therefore, the nonaccuracy of the PFH formula related to the 2oo3 has not been stated before. This paper proposes a new and more accurate formula.

Buildings maintenance is a complex activity: importance of issues, scales crossing, diversity of civil engineering domains … The key point of this activity is the elaboration of the maintenance. This paper seeks to present a method and the associated tools to elaborate a building maintenance plan considering the complexity of the facility management.

The risk notion can be a solution to handle the complexity. Specialists may specify each decision in terms of risk form in order to purchase (reflecting the probability and the associated consequences) a rich view about the global situation. The principle is to use a simulation logic, to compare the situation in terms of risk, with or without the realization of an action (work, equipment replacement, formation, etc.). This simulation logic must be based on efficient software tools, which enable one to manage the risk database ergonomically.

The method took the form of an experiment in a leading French company. The experiment's results and plan were highly beneficial. Although the method was based on personal choices rather than on a mathematical function, the final maintenance plan was considered sound and seemed to correspond to the expectations of all the participants.

Most facilities management methods and tools find answering the complexity problem difficult. They ignore the complexity by focusing only on the technical aspect. The work takes place at the highest facility management level, therefore shedding new light on this domain. The risk notion enables one to consider the complexity of the maintenance and to formalize it into an understandable form for the decision‐maker.

Despite the wide research and discussion on international performance, innovation and digital resilience dimensions of enterprises, the investigation and understanding of their interrelations seem to be limited. The purpose of this study is to identify the influential factors affecting the mentioned dimensions, determine the causal relationships among these identified factors and finally evaluate their importance in an aggregated framework from the viewpoint of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

A hybrid methodology is used to achieve the objectives. First, the main factors of international performance, innovation and digital resilience are extracted by an in-depth review of the literature. These factors are then screened by expert opinions to localize them in accordance with the conditions of an emerging economy. Finally, the relationship and the importance of the factors are determined using an uncertain multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach.

The findings reveal that there is a correlation between digital resilience and innovation, and both factors have an impact on the international performance of SMEs. The cause-or-effect nature of the factors belonging to each dimension is also determined. Among the effect factors, business model innovation (BMI), agility, product and organizational innovation are known as the most important factors. International knowledge, personal drivers and digital transformation are also determined to be the most important cause factors.

This study extends the literature both in methodological and practical directions. Practically, the study aggregates the factors in the mentioned dimensions and provides insights into their cause-and-effect interrelations. Methodologically, the study proposes an uncertain MCDM approach that has been rarely used in previous studies in this field.

Food and beverage (F&B) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) must diversify their markets and obtain predictable sources of revenues to withstand difficult and volatile periods such as the post-pandemic geopolitical scenario, recently burdened by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. On the other hand, another strand of the literature suggests that public procurement could be considered a great source of income, enabling solid contracts, revenues and cash-flow stability. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the role of public procurement, the adoption of e-commerce platforms and their interactions in affecting the exporting performances of SMEs operating in the F&B sector.

The study retrieves data from 2,186 Italian F&B manufacturing SMEs relying on Margò by Cribis database. Therefore, it conducts a structured equational model (SEM) to test the developed hypotheses empirically.

The findings reveal that digital selling platforms positively affect exports, whereas public procurement negatively affects F&B SMEs exports. Nonetheless, findings underline that the interaction between public procurement and the adoption of digital selling platforms dampens public procurement's negative effects on exports.

This study brings an original contribution to the F&B literature by conducting empirical research on an extensive sample of firms from one of the most influential countries in the F&B vertical, Italy, with officially registered data. More importantly, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this study pioneers the investigation of the relationship between public procurement and e-commerce platforms in affecting F&B SMEs' export performances.

This paper seeks to propose a methodology based on Petri nets to evaluate the reliability parameters of a screening system in paper industry. The effects of failures and courses of action on the system performance have also been investigated.

Generalized stochastic Petri nets (GSPN), a class of Petri nets, has been used to model the interactions amongst the active/standby units of the system; and Markovian approach has been used to evaluate the reliability parameters. The data related to equipments' operational behavior were collected, processed and quantified. Using the data, reliability analysis of system in the long run conditions has been carried out. The sensitivity analysis has been performed to study the effect of failure/repair rates of each unit of the system on system performance.

The methodology adopted in this paper provides a better understanding on the behavior of the system through its graphical representation. The reachability graph generated with Petri net model helps to identify the state space evolution of the system.

Reliability analysis of a screening system of the paper industry presented in this paper will help management in deciding upon the maintenance strategy to be adopted with the objective of improving the performance of the system and consequently reducing the operational and maintenance costs.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between geographic diversification (GD) and export performance (EP) by analysing a sample of small exporters in an emerging market.

The study sample comprised 96 small and medium-sized exporting enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam. The data is analysed using multiple regression analysis (MRA), Hayes' process model and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

The results indicate that GD significantly negatively affects EP. In this dilemma, the export market orientation (EMO) and digital transformation positively moderated the relationship between GD and EP, such that the negative effect of GD on EP was weaker when EMO and digital were stronger.

This initial study contributes significantly to international business theories and practices, which reveal the role of GD via firm digital capacity and EMO in thriving SMEs’ EP. This study might grant new insight into international business and a critical approach to addressing the new insights small firms may face in a fragile but technologically advanced world.

This paper aims to propose a methodology based on Petri nets to evaluate the reliability characteristics of the pulping system of a paper industry in a realistic working environment. The effects of occurrence of failure/course of actions and availability of repair facilities on system performance have been investigated.

Stochastic Reward Nets (SRN), an extension of Petri nets, are applied to model the interactions among the active/standby units of the system and reliability parameters have been evaluated using Monte Carlo simulation.

The methodology adopted in this paper provides a better understanding of the behavior of the system under varying operating conditions. Reliability analysis of a pulping system of a paper industry presented in this paper will help the management in deciding upon the maintenance strategy to be adopted to improve the performance of the system and consequently reduce the operation and maintenance cost.

The application of the proposed technique will not only help the reliability engineers/managers/system engineers to understand the dynamic behavior of complex systems but also helps to plan/adapt suitable maintenance policies to improve system reliability/availability.