As a result of the worldwide depletion of natural resources, increased energy use, and environmental, economic, and social imbalance, organizations are working to identify the proper strategies supporting the continuous reduction of their impacts. While this trend is fundamentally agreed upon in the literature, several manufacturing industries still fail to identify which elements most influence their contributions to the impact of sustainability and how to easily manage the calculation of these effects within a manufacturing system. The purpose of this article is to incorporate sustainability practices into manufacturing by developing a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for assessing and improving environmental and economic management practices at the corporate and production level. The definition of the framework began with in-depth research of the leading indicators and framework types in the literature, integrating the most exploited industrial standards to make them easily acceptable in the industrial domain. Then, to provide a broad view of company behavior, the framework has been designed to take either an inventory and impact point of view, thus providing indicators for the online monitoring of the company operations, or assessing their impacts in an LCA-LCC perspective. In selecting the indicators and the definition of the framework structure, five industrial cases covering different business sectors were involved in identifying the most critical indicators in terms of calculability and defining a structure that would allow for their application in various business situations. Therefore, the defined framework has been validated at a conceptual level, thus laying the basis for future quantitative validation. Twenty key performance indicators (KPIs) for assessing the sustainability of manufacturing firms have been created based on the 163 indicators studied.

This topical collection includes contributions from Transport Research Arena (TRA) 2020, an international event that covers all transport modes and all aspects of mobility. The theme of the Transport Research Arena 2020 was "Rethinking transporttowards clean and inclusive mobility". The theme itself highlights the complexity of transitioning towards sustainable mobility systems. At the centre of this transition is an urgent

This paper describes work done to specify, design and test an offshore intervention vessel for operation off northern Norway and in the Norwegian part of the Barents Sea on an all-year basis. The design has been developed basedon input from manufacturers of subsea systems, owners of offshore vessels and Statoil. Research and development effort have been shared between research institutes (MARINTEK and VTT), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Statoil, STX OSV and Aker Arctic Technology. The work has been done as a part of the Norwegian Research Council supported project “Construction and intervention vessels for Arctic oil and gas – CIVArctic).

This paper describes ongoing work to tailor make an offshore intervention vessel for operations off the coast of Norway and in Svalbard waters. Operational requirements have been specified using subject matter experts from oil and shipping industries, equipment manufacturers and research organizations. A business case has been prepared for a vessel operating from a base in Northern Norway and serving two potential fields, one close to the coast of Finnmark (Goliat field) and the other one in the Olga Basin east of Svalbard. Available metocean and ice data have been collected and used for a parameter variation study of vessel characteristics. These data has also been used when selecting sea-state conditions to be used in the initial model test studies performed in MARINTEK's towing tank and ocean basin. The measured vessel response characteristics have been discussed with equipment manufacturers in an attempt to specify operational limits for key intervention tasks. Background Several studies point to a future need to increased production of offshore oil and gas in the Arctic region. The newly agreed Russian - Norway delimitation line in the Barents Sea will open up for increased activities in the Norwegian part of the Barents Sea. Most of the Norwegian part of the Barents Sea has a year-around open sea condition, but in the north-eastern part there is seasonal ice up to 3–4 months of the year. Designing an intervention vessel for operating under these conditions is a challenge as it needs high operability in both open water and first year ice. The CIVARCTIC project MARINTEK started work to describe a research and development project for an Arctic construction and intervention vessel in early 2008. A project proposal was approved by Research Council of Norway in June 2008 and the project started September that year. Project partners were:StatoilSTX Europe (now STX OSV Design)Norwegian University of Science and TechnologyMARINTEKAker Arctic TechnologyVTT As shown in Figure 1 there is a number of design considerations for an arctic construction and intervention vessel. It has to be a stable working platform during intervention work in open seas, have low operational emissions during transit and operation, have sheltered working spaces to allow operations in the winter season and must be able to perform specific intervention operations in first year ice with a thickness up to 0.7.