RESEARCH
Risk, safety and resilience engineering
The main aim of my research is about modelling complex socio-technical systems, i.e. systems with many tightly interacting technological, human, and social agents.
Acknowledging the limitations of traditional approaches for risk and safety management, this research is oriented to both theoretical development and pragmatical application of systemic methods and models, with particular reference to the relatively new discipline of "Resilience Engineering", and in relation to the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM). The application domains refer to a wide range of socio-technical systems, i.e. industrial plants, air traffic control, aviation, maritime operations, healthcare practices. Particular attention is devoted to the integration of socio-technical systems with their cyber-physical counterparts (check our recently introduced WAx framework). This research advocates also for additional open paths linking resilience (cf. cyber-resilience) to both safety and security aspects.
An overview of my recent research activities about Resilience Engineering can be found here. In case you have already heard about our open-source tool myFRAM, you can freely download it here.
Business process management
This stream of my research is aimed at the analysis, assessment and improvement of business processes through the adoption of quality management techniques and the development of performance indicators usable at different organizational levels.
The current complex nature of systems demands for the development of novel indicators which should be reliable, robust and actually representative of a system's state. This research aims at exploring the complexity of the business process, trading-off "what can be measured" in light of "what should be measured". The entire research stream is inspired by the acknowledgment of the WYLIWIF principle (What-You-Look-For-Is-What-You-Find).
An example of an early simplified business intelligence dashboard developed in collaboration with EUROCONTROL is available here (feel free to play with the experimental data available).
Maintenance eng. and inventory manag.
This stream of my research activities refers to the optimization of maintenance interventions, in relation to reliability needs, availability and budget constraints in multi-echelon multi-indenture multi-item systems.
The research approach is aimed at developing advanced inventory management models which could reduce costs and ensure high service levels in complex systems. The approaches are developed in line with parameters that have a user-friendly dimension for decision-makers, and aim to represent a contact point between traditional reliability-inspired models and supply chain management techniques, to pursue a systemic optimization. In operational terms, the research defines dedicated heuristics and explores the usage of genetic algorithms, pattern search.
A basic technique used within this research is the Multi-Echelon Technique for Recoverable Item Control (METRIC), whose original details can be found here.