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Food waste (FW) is a significant problem in the hospitality sector worldwide. The Covid-19 pandemic has imposed a health protocol on the hospitality sector to protect the customers and the community. This paper aims to evince a new understanding of the tourist city during the Covid-19 pandemic by exploring the effects of the new health protocol on FW management at the consumption stage in the hospitality sector in Dubai.

In this study, the authors use a scale assessment method and a survey distributed to 202 tables in 35 restaurants offering open buffet catering in Dubai.

The paper’s findings provide evidence that: first, the tourist city has faced substantial changes during the pandemic as the new health protocol imposed by the Covid-19 circumstances has mitigated the waste of food in the open buffet services. Second, the highest waste has been observed for vegetables, followed by grains (especially rice) and bread. The lowest waste has been observed for meat and fruits. Third, FW per table varies considerably by consumer groups. The FW quantity of residents is significantly higher than that of tourists. Family gathering tables with an essential number of children waste more food than the other group types. Fourth, consumers claimed to become more conscious about the quantum of FW as a direct response to the socio-economic circumstances imposed by the lockdown such as food availability, salary reduction, economic uncertainty and employment instability. Fifth, the attitude to keeping food on the plate does not change considerably.

This paper offers many practical implications. Using newly discovered pieces of evidence from practitioners, hoteliers and policymakers, this paper highlights current hospitality practices that can reduce the waste of food in a postpandemic world. Furthermore, our paper suggests a set of actions for restaurants offering open-buffet services to reduce FW at the consumption stage.

This paper adds significance to the extant tourist city literature. The tourist city served as an example of a recent urban development characterized mainly by tourist consumption. This research advances the understanding of FW management and customers’ behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic in an important touristic city “Dubai” and suggests a set of actions.

Restructuring a business process (BP) model may enhance the BP performance and improve its understandability. So-far proposed restructuring methods use either refactoring which focuses on structural aspects, social network discovery which uses semantic information to guide the affiliation process during its analysis, or social network rediscovery which uses structural information to identify clusters of actors according to their relationships. The purpose of this paper is to propose a hybrid method that exploits both the semantic and structural aspects of a BP model.

The proposed method first generates a social network from the BP model. Second, it applies hierarchical clustering to determine the performers’ partitions; this step uses the social context which specifies features related to performers, and two new distances that account for semantic and structural information. Finally, it applies a set of behavioral and organizational restructuring rules adapted from the graph optimization domain; each rule uses the identified performers’ partitions and the business context to reduce particular quality metrics.

The efficiency of the proposed method is illustrated through well-established complexity metrics. The illustration is made through the development of a tool that fully supports the proposed method and proposes a strategy for the application of the restructuring rules.

The proposed method has the merit of combining the semantic and structural aspects of a Business Process Modeling Notation model to identify restructuring operations whose ordered application reduces the complexity of the initial model.