RESEARCH TOPICS
ADAPTIVE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
I’m strongly interested in investigating advanced methodologies allowing to aid industrial operators with fast adaptive planning and re-planning tools. I had the chance to work on these topics in the aerospace sector and, more specifically, to develop an advanced adaptive tool for optimizing the operations in the European spaceport of Kourou. Given the high-quality and zero-error requirements of such application domain, the developed solution can be adapted to other critical sectors. Current research lines in this context involve the development of scalable and distributed deep learning approaches reducing the required training time and able to cope with problems with huge dimensions.
SMART ENERGY MANAGEMENT
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Since the beginning of my research activities, the smart management of energy consumption has been a crucial aspect, both at the residential and industrial level. In the context of smart cities, I’ve addressed the problem from the energy demand side management point of view in presence of electric vehicles. More specifically, the developed solution envisaged a decentralized control framework able to flatten the energy demand curve by means of smart charging algorithms. Current research lines regard a dynamic personalized integration of locally produced energy with the traditional grid at the residential level considering different user profiles. At the industrial level, I’m addressing such integration taking into account a given set of activities to be performed; the objective is to provide an operations planning tool able to minimize the energy usage optimizing the balance between the energy absorbed from the energy greed and from the local energy storage systems.
TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Telecommunications have been an important subject covered during my academic career and represent a crucial aspect in today’s world. In this respect, the main research activities regarded the integration of terrestrial (e.g., 5G, 4G, WiFi) and satellite communications channels. More specifically, in order to fully exploit the potentialities of 5G, I’ve dealt with the development of multi-RAT (Radio Access Technologies) allowing to smartly manage multiple simultaneous connections belonging to different RATs (e.g., part of the traffic can be sent via the 5G network and part on the satellite network). This solution allowed to investigate 5G killer applications such as the deployment of personalized and wireless Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) services. Currently, I’m addressing this problem in the cultural sector characterized by sites in remote areas (where the availability of satellite connections must be exploited) and sites in densely populated areas (where a smart selection of – multiple – access points is needed to avoid congestion and match the challenging requirements of the mentioned services).
SMART MOBILITY
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Given the high environmental impact of ground transportation, the development of innovative solutions for moving people and goods has captured my attention since following the M. Sc. in Control Engineering. More specifically, I’ve dealt with the problem of defining personalized multi-modal solutions able to minimize the environmental impact of transportation while maximizing the perceived quality of the journey. This research line flowed into the one concerning the smart management of energy in residential areas whereas the goal is to optimize the routing and charging strategies of users while maximizing their satisfaction. This latter aspect involves the adoption of clustering algorithms to infer user profiles and the development of satisfaction models for each class of user profiles.
CYBER-SECURITY
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During the first years of my Ph.D., I tackled the problem of aiding critical infrastructure operators with respect to cyber-security aspects. More specifically, the idea was to provide operators with an advanced tool able to assess the security level of a given infrastructure and also to propose security configurations (e.g., suggesting the deployment of a security camera in a given position or, in general, the deployment of a security mechanisms instead of another) matching the desired security level of the operators. To do this, the first step consisted in developing a security metric able to capture relevant aspects allowing to define the notion of security. The developed security metric has been taken in consideration for being embedded in the open-source security standard that I’ve extended in order to capture innovative aspects (such as the components life-cycle and the different contribution of vulnerabilities). Once defined the metric, it has been possible to define a control framework to obtain security configurations matching given security levels.