The new awareness of the consumers regarding environmental issues should allow companies to gain a competitive advantage by obtaining eco-labels which certify the low impact of a product on the environment. Getting such label requires to analyse a product according to rules expressed in natural language which may be difficult to interpret but also to apply when the product is complex. In order to address this problem, we suggest a method aiming at providing support to the user when checking the compliance of a product with an eco-label. The method is applied on an illustrative example of the literature.

International audiencePushed by globalization and its consequent increased competition, supply chain managers have understood the importance of information sharing, joint decision-making and cooperation across supply chains. Therefore, how to synchronize local activities through global processes and how to establish a collaborative supply chain relationship are actual difficulties that supply chain members have to address. In this context, this paper suggests a model of the situations of cooperation in supply chains for coping with real industrial situations, based on an analysis of the limitations of previous models. It is shown how the suggested model may allow to identify dysfunctions in the cooperation process, especially when both large and small companies are involved, and can also be used to describe and monitor the possible evolution of the cooperation process. Finally, the model may help to specify the way information should be efficiently processed all along a supply chain, depending on the situation of cooperation

Allocating the right person to a task or job is a key issue for improving quality and performance of achievements, usually addressed using the concept of ''competences''. Nevertheless, providing an accurate assessment of the competences of an individual may be in practice a difficult task. We suggest in this paper to model the uncertainty on the competences possessed by a person using a possibility distribution, and the imprecision on the competences required for a task using a fuzzy constraint, taking into account the possible interactions between competences using a Choquet integral. As a difference with comparable approaches, we then suggest to perform the allocation of persons to jobs using a robust optimisation approach, allowing to minimise the risk taken by the decision maker. We first apply this framework to the problem of selecting a candidate within n for a job, then extend the method to the problem of selecting c candidates for j jobs (c P j) using the leximin criterion.

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The present major concern on sustainable development is at the beginning of a growing interest on product recyclability. More and more strict norms and regulations will be prescribed to companies in order to increase the level of recyclability of industrial products. Usually described in natural language, these norms can be difficult to interpret for the product designer. There will also be an increasing need in tools to verify the compliance of a product with given norms and standards. A prototype of such a system is described in this article: the information to be added to the product model is first specified. It is then shown how the knowledge contained in standards and norms in textual form can be translated into constraints which can be propagated through the product structure in order to identify the inconsistencies between the present design and a given norm. An example of the literature is used to illustrate the suggested methodology and the results of its application through a software prototype.

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a b s t r a c tIn this paper, we investigate the impact of environmental factors on the dynamical transmission of cholera within a human community. We propose a mathematical model for the dynamical transmission of cholera that incorporates the virulence of bacteria and the commensalism relationship between bacteria and the aquatic reservoirs on the persistence of the disease. We provide a theoretical study of the model. We derive the basic reproduction number R 0 which determines the extinction and the persistence of the infection. We show that the disease-free equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable whenever R 0 ≤ 1 , while when R 0 > 1 , the disease-free equilibrium is unstable and there exists a unique endemic equilibrium point which is locally asymptotically stable on a positively invariant region of the positive orthant. The sensitivity analysis of the model has been performed in order to determine the impact of related parameters on outbreak severity. Theoretical results are supported by numerical simulations, which further suggest the necessity to implement sanitation campaigns of aquatic environments by using suitable products against the bacteria during the periods of growth of aquatic reservoirs.

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