Abstract
Background Engaging in advance care planning can be emotionally challenging, but gamification and technology are suggested as a potential solution. Objective Present the development stages of a mobile app prototype to improve quality of life for patients in palliative care. Design The study started with a comprehensive literature review to establish a foundation. Subsequently, interviews were conducted to validate the proposed features of the mobile application. Following the development phase, usability tests were conducted to evaluate the overall usability of the mobile application. Furthermore, an oral questionnaire was administered to understand user satisfaction about the implemented features. Results A three-phase testing approach was employed based on the chosen user-centred design methodology to obtain the results. Three iterations were conducted, with improvements being made based on feedback and tested in subsequent phases. Despite the added complexity arising from the health status of patients in palliative care, the usability tests and implemented features received positive feedback from both patients and healthcare providers. Conclusion The research findings have demonstrated the potential of digitisation in enhancing the quality of life for patients in palliative care. This was achieved through the implementation of patient-centred design, personalised care, the inclusion of social chatrooms and facilitating end-of-life discussions.

Abstract
[No abstract available]

Abstract
Trade promotions are complex marketing agreements between a retailer and a manufacturer aiming to drive up sales. The retailer proposes numerous sales promotions that the manufacturer partially supports through discounts and deductions. In the Portuguese consumer packaged goods (CPG) sector, the proportion of price-promoted sales to regular-priced sales has increased significantly, making proper promotional planning crucial in ensuring manufacturer margins. In this context, a decision support system was developed to aid in the promotional planning process of two key product categories of a Portuguese CPG manufacturer. This system allows the manufacturer’s commercial team to plan and simulate promotional scenarios to better evaluate a proposed trade promotion and negotiate its terms. The simulation is powered by multiple gradient boosting machine models that estimate sales for a given promotion based solely on the scarce data available to the manufacturer. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
The Vehicle Routing Problem with Divisible Deliveries and Pickups (VRPDDP) is under-explored in literature, yet it has a wide application in practice in a reverse logistics context, where the collection returnable items must also be ensured along with the traditional delivery of products to customers. problem considers that each customer has both delivery and pickup demands and may be visited twice in the same or different routes (i.e., splitting customers' visits). In several reverse logistics problems, capacity restrictions are required to either allow the movement of the driver inside the vehicle to arrange the loads or to avoid cross-contamination between delivery and pickup loads. In this work, explore the economic and the environmental impacts of the VRPDDP, with and without restrictions the free capacity, and compare it with the traditional Vehicle Routing Problem with Simultaneous Deliveries and Pickups (VRPSDP), on savings achieved by splitting customers visits. An exact method, solved through Gurobi, and an ALNS metaheuristic are coded in Python and used to test well-known and newly generated instances. A multi-objective approach based on the augmented e-constraint method is applied to obtain and compare solutions minimizing costs and CO2 emissions. The results demonstrate that splitting customer visits reduces the CO2 emissions for load-constrained distribution problems. Moreover, savings percentage of the VRPDDP when compared to the VRPSDP is higher for instances with a random network than when a clustered network of customers is considered.

Abstract

Abstract
Cutting and packing problems have been widely studied in the last decades, mainly due to the variety of industrial applications where the problems emerge. This paper presents an overview of the solution approaches that have been proposed for solving two-dimensional rectangular cutting and packing problems. The main emphasis of this work is on two distinct problems that belong to the cutting and packing problem family. The first problem aims to place onto an object the maximum-profit subset of items, that is, output maximization, while the second one aims to place all the items using as few identical objects as possible, that is, input minimization. The objective of this paper is not to be exhaustive but to provide a solid grasp on two-dimensional rectangular cutting and packing problems by describing their most important solution approaches.