Research Activities

... where the goal-oriented approach is applied to model and analyze requirements concerning security (Secure Tropos). Concepts like actor, goal, task, social dependency, trust, ownership and delegation are used to model and analyze security issues. He is the leader of the team that has developed the Socio-Technical Security Modeling Language tool (STS - http://www.sts-tool.eu), which has been used in several research and industrial projects funded at provincial, national and European level, such as IT-PAT-MOSTRO, EU-FP7-IP-ANIKETOS, EU-FP6-IP-SERENITY, and more recently EU-H2020-IA-VISION. The STS method supports the security and privacy-by-design principle where security and privacy requirements are elicited starting from stakeholders needs and international and national laws (e.g., the EU GDPR) and then, following a model driven approach, refined in a set of properties to be satised by the system-to-be. SecBPM is an extension of BPMN 2.0 with security annotations; fully integrated with STS, it allows analysts to map security and privacy requirements in a set of policies to be satisfied during the execution of business processes. SecBPMN is currently experimented in an industrial project in collaboration with the Province of Trento and the Italian authority for privacy in e-health services (IT-IND-STSPrivacy). STS proposes also modeling techniques for information security risk management, where information are handled as assets of an organization, and security risks and countermeasures are assessed against their economical value.

... where meta-model based approaches are used to build representations of complex organizational environments from different perspectives (views). Each perspective shows a view of the overall model through a specific modeling language and allows experts of different domains to interact one another using their own concepts and modeling abstractions. The approach has been initially adopted within the STS method and then applied to other contexts, such as for the problem of the architectural change management of Air Traffic Management Systems in the European project EU-H2020-RIA-PACAS where cross-view reasoning techniques and gamification elements  have been used to support users interaction and to allow for an effective participation to the change management processes. Similarly, the multi-view modeling is currently experimented in an industrial project IT-IND-DIGICOM where different experts have to explore complex environments from different perspectives in order to find effective solutions to the problem of costs management.

Past activities

Other research activities include: Design Patterns , where the Tropos methodology is combined with more traditional software engineering and organizational theories for the definition, specification and management of design patterns; Multi-agent systems for knowledge management, where agent-based technologies are combined with data mining and collaborative filtering techniques (Implicit Culture project); multi-agent systems for mobile devices focusing on negotiation mechanisms for multi-agent systems (e.g., auction) and on wireless infrastructures for ambient Ambient Intelligence applications; Agent-based technology and Service-Oriented System, that is the development of agent-based techniques and methodologies to support the design and the run-time execution of service-oriented systems; and, goal-oriented methodologies for data warehouse design.

Earlier research activities, mainly related to the years of the PhD and PostDoc, include: (2001-2003) Goal driven Knowledge Management; (1999-2003) Agents' Mental State Recognition and Revision; (1998-2003) Belief Revision; (2000-2002) XML and data integration; (1999-2002) Articial Intelligence and Law; (1997-1999) Revision of BDI mental states; (1996-1997) BDI Agents; (1998-1999) Distributed Monitoring Systems and Articial Intelligence.