The relevant role of freight lorry parking facilities as a tool to reduce nuisances and impact of economic activities in densely populated urban areas is widely recognised in the literature. Nevertheless, the literature currently lacks specific contributions addressing the use of a complex Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) approach for coping with an optimal location of freight lorry parking facilities in the urban context.

Background. Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a chronic metabolic disease potentially leading to serious widespread tissue damage. Human organism develops T2D when the glucose-insulin control is broken for reasons that are not fully understood but have been demonstrated to be linked to the emergence of a chronic inflammation. Indeed such low-level chronic inflammation affects the pancreatic production of insulin and triggers the development of insulin resistance, eventually leading to an impaired control of the blood glucose concentration.

Background. The three terms "panic", "irrationality", and "herding" are ubiquitous in the crowd dynamics literature and have a strong influence on both modelling and management practices. The terms are also commonly shared between the scientific and nonscientific domains. The pervasiveness of the use of these terms is to the point where their underlying assumptions have often been treated as common knowledge by both experts and lay persons. Yet, at the same time, the literature on crowd dynamics presents ample debate, contradiction, and inconsistency on these topics. Method.

Presentazione delle attività di ricerca su computational immunology e network medicine al workshop "Hot Topics in Systems" all'interno della conferenza PLACE2019

Cell motility is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response. The physics of cell crawling on a substrate is by now well understood, whilst cell motion in bulk (cell swimming) is far from being completely characterized. We present here a minimal model for pattern formation within a compressible actomyosin gel, in both 2D and 3D, which shows that contractility leads to the emergence of an actomyosin droplet within a low density background. This droplet then becomes self-motile for sufficiently large motor contractility.

In this study, we developed a predictive model of in vivo stent based drug release and distribution that is capable of providing useful insights into performance. In a combined mathematical modelling and experimental approach, we created two novel sirolimus-eluting stent coatings with quite distinct doses and release kinetics. Using readily measurable in vitro data, we then generated parameterised mathematical models of drug release. These were then used to simulate in vivo drug uptake and retention.

Predicting the release performance of a drug delivery device is an important challenge in pharmaceutics and biomedical science. In this paper, we consider a multi-layer diffusion model of drug release from a composite spherical microcapsule into an external surrounding medium. Based on this model, we present two approaches for estimating the release time, i.e. the time required for the drug-filled capsule to be depleted.