Informazioni per gli studenti (Info for students, in Italian)

Il ricevimento studenti è fissato al Giovedì dalle ore 14 alle ore 16

Notizie sui corsi sono diponibili nella relativa pagina web [vai]

Temi di ricerca sui Sistemi Informativi per i quali è possibile svolgere elaborati di 1o livello o tesi di laurea di 2o livello sono disponibili nella relativa pagina web [vai]

Research interests

My research interests are about three main areas: Service Retrieval, Service Adaptation, and Service Quality. At this time, approaches developed in these areas are applied into two domains: Green-IT and Emergency Management Information Systems.

Areas

Web service retrieval
Main research interest is about the Web service retrieval. I start with the assumption that two Web services are equal when both they require the same information as input and they produce same data as output. Consistently with the Service Oriented Computing paradigm, Web services are treated as black boxes and the similarity algorithm only works with the Web service signatures expressed by WSDL/SAWSDL, regardless of their implementation. The similarity algorithm takes into account both naming and structural aspects. On the one hand, naming aspects refer to the names adopted for identifying the service, the available operations, and the related exchanged parameters. On the other hand, the structural aspects refer to the number of operations available and the data type of the input/output parameters.
The results in this research field have been implemented in URBE (Uddi Registry By Example): an UDDI extension supporting content-based queries. This tool aims at supporting programmers during both the development and the execution of Web service-based applications. Despite the current registry, the user can find a Web service not only browsing pre-defined taxonomies, or by keyword. In fact, with URBE, the user can submit a WSDL specifying the required Web service in terms of supported operations and input and output parameters. As a result, URBE returns the set of published Web service more similar to the submitted one. URBE is a part of PAWS.
The work is now focused on the improvement of the performance of the algorithm in terms of precision, recall, and response time. About the precision and recall I am exploiting additional models to describe a Web service (e.g., OWL-S, REST). About the response time, it is under evaluation to join a clusterization mechanisms.

Main publication: P. Plebani, B. Pernici, "URBE: Web service Retrieval based on Similarity Evaluation", to appear on IEEE Transaction on Knowledge and Data Engineering. [link]

Web service adaptation
In this field I participate during the design and the implementation of PAWS (Processes with Adaptive Web Services): a framework for flexible and adaptive execution of managed Web service-based business processes. In the framework several modules for service adaptation are integrated in a coherent way. An original characteristic of this framework is to couple design-time and run-time mechanisms for process specification and execution in a global framework. At design-time, flexibility is achieved through a number of mechanisms, i.e., identifying a set candidate services for each process tasks, negotiating quality of service, specifying quality constraints, and identifying mapping rules for invoking services with different interfaces. In turn, the run-time exploits the design-time mechanisms to support adaptation during process execution, in terms of selecting the best set of services to execute the process, reacting to a service failure, or preserving the execution when a context change occurs.
WS-CoL (WS-Constraint Language) and WS-ReL (WS-Recovery Language) as WS-Policy compliant language to express contraints and recovery mechanisms for BPEL processes.
Currently, I am going to validate and possibly extend the approach by considering a specific scenario: Risk Management Systems.

Main publication: D. Ardagna, M. Comuzzi, E. Mussi, B. Pernici, and P. Plebani. PAWS: a framework for processes with adaptive web services, IEEE Software 24(6), pp. 39-46 [link]

Web service quality
Before a service invocation takes place, an agreement between the service provider and the service user might be required. Such an agreement is the result of a negotiation process between the two parties and defines how the service invocation has to occur. Considering the Service Oriented Computing paradigm, the relationship among providers and users is extremely loose. Traditional agreements are likely to concern long term relationships and to be manually performed.
In this scenario, the research is focused on the definition of a quality model that supports both users requirements and providers capabilities definition and on a model to generate service level agreement on-the-fly. Just before the invocation commences, the quality of the service is negotiated in order to generate a service level agreement tied to that specific invocation.
The use of Semantic Web approaches to improve the automation of the negotiation is under investigation.

Main publication: C. Cappiello, M. Comuzzi, P. Plebani, “On Automated Generation of Web Service Level Agreements”, In Proceedings of International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'07), Trondheim , Norway, June 2007. [pdf (1.5 MB)] [link]

Domains

Green IT
Green IT is "the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated subsystems—such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems—efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment." (Harnessing Green IT: Principles and Practices, San Murugesan). Here, the research is about the sustainability of information systems and the applications that run on them. In particular, the objective is to propose innovative methodologies, methods, and tools for co-designing green applications. In this way an application can be defined also in terms of its energy consumption since a relationship with the underlying physical infrastructure is defined.
By annotating applications with this information, information systems can detect possible energy leakage and, in case, react by enacting the most suitable adaptation strategy. Adaptations could have different degrees of pervasiveness: starting from the re-allocation of the resource, to the re-design of the business process structure.

Emergency Management Information Systems (EMIS)
EMISs represent the technological core of EOCs (Emergency Operations Centers). These systems usually rely on data gathered by installed sensors that are able to monitor phsysical phenomena related to the kinds of the emergency that the EMIS should support. Where, when, and how these data are gathered is defined at the design time, while EMIS functionalities are defined. Therefore, the processes supported by a specific EMIS strictly depend on the data available at design time. Unfortunately, this kind of approach conflicts with the nature of processes that should be enacted during an emergency. Moreover, the collection of disaster agent-generated requests changes as time passes from the time of impact; requests associated with initial impact may decline while new demands arise from secondary threats
The research focuses on the characterization of flexible EMIS aspect that actually involves different classes of enabling technologies and defines diverse dataflow management systems. The design of collaborative EOCs is firstly based on the analyses of the cognitive and organizational aspects characterizing complex multi-actor decision-making processes under stress. A technological analysis successively completed will explicit how to make possible the interoperability among existing EOCs taking into account the specific characteristics of the various organizations that will use them, the way in which such organizations are coordinated in emergency situations and the possible undesired effects that the technology incorporates, especially when used in critical scenarios. Through this project, we aim to propose an approach for driving the design of flexible EMISs, where the definition of contingency scenarios, as well as, the definition of contingency plans will be much flexible and straightforward activities. With respect to the existing approaches, the flexible EMIS exploits the information published on the Web by means of the Web 2.0 applications (e.g., social networks, RSS feed) to better drive the emergency operators during emergency response and the recovery activities.

Coverage

The following table expresses in which domain, the proposed approaches are validated

Recent publications

P. Plebani, C. Cappiello, M. Comuzzi, B. Pernici, S. Yadav, MicroMAIS: executing and orchestrating Web services on constrained mobile devices, Software & Practice Experience (accepted for publication) [link]

C. Cappiello, M.G. Fugini, A. M. Ferreira, P. Plebani, M. Vitali, Business Process Co-Design for Energy-Aware Adaptation, accepted for publication in Proceedings of IEEE ICCP (special session on Green Computing), Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 25-27 August, 2011.

C. Tudor, I. Anghel, I. Salomie, D. Moldovan, G. Copil and P. Plebani, Dynamic Consolidation Methodology for Optimizing the Energy Consumption in Large Virtualized Service Centers, accepted for publication in Proceedings of FedCSIS 2011 (WoSS track), Szczecin, Poland, 18-21 September, 2011.

V. Andrikopoulos, P. Plebani, Retrieving Compatible Web Services, in Proceedings of Int'l Conference on Web Services (ICWS), Washington DC, USA, July 4-9, 2011. [link]

M. Comuzzi, K. Kritikos, P. Plebani, "A semantic based framework for supporting negotiation in Service Oriented Architectures", accepted for publication in Proceedings of 11th IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (CEC’09), Vienna, Austria, July 20-23, 2009.

[ ... more]

Active projects

GAMES Project	S-CUBE Project
TEKNE Project	MIARIA Project

Past projects

WS-DIAMOND Project	Easylog Project
MAIS Project	EIDA Project