The purpose of this paper is two-fold. In Part 1 we introduce a new theory of operadic categories and their operads.
This theory is, in our opinion, of an independent value. In Part 2 we use this new theory together with our previous results to prove that multiplicative 1-operads in duoidal categories admit, under some mild conditions on the underlying monoidal category, natural actions of contractible 2-operads.
The result of D. Tamarkin on the structure of dg-categories, as well as the classical Deligne conjecture for the Hochschild cohomology, is a particular case of this statement. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Inc.