Critical Infrastructure Protection

The growing complexity and vulnerability of the major technological networks require metholologies for evaluating their safety and security and the possible consequences of any action. ENEA is developing an organic system of ICT technologies, methodologies, models and decision-support systems that can give major infrastructure operators information on possible future scenarios. The overall goals will be to:

• lower the vulnerabilities of large technological networks, caused both by intrusions and malfunctioning of the network control systems, as well as by human errors;
• give a support for preventing domino effects, where failure of one of the elements in a technological network shifts its load to nearby elements in the system, through the use of sophisticated interdependences modelling;
• supply the organizations in charge of large infrastructure crisis management with information of the kind "what if" with regard of possible scenario evolutions, by integrating information from the territory with those from Large National Infrastructures.

Current CIP projects:

• CIPRNET
• SINERGREEN

Previous CIP projects:

• CRESCO
• DIESIS

Biomechanics

The research work on Biomechanics is an interdisciplinary research work in the field of myocardial physiology modelling. In particular, we study the endomysial collagen contribution to the passive mechanics of cardiac muscle. Note that also the endomysial collagen micro anatomical arrangement is still a matter of debate. In order to investigate the mechanical and structural properties of the endomysial collagen, we consider two alternative computational models of some specific aspects of the cardiac muscle. These two models represent two different views of endomysial collagen distributions as revealed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of non macerated or NaOH macerated samples. The computational modelling technique that we used is inspired to pre-structured recurrent neural networks. We modelled the myocardial tissue as a net of springs representing the cardiomyocytes together with the endomysial collagen distribution. We treated the springs as elementary units, and we connected them in order to imitate the interconnections between collagen fibers forming the collagen distribution. Then we stressed the net of springs by applying some external forces of suitable magnitude and direction.

Formal Methods

My research in Formal Methods focuses in the analysis and development of model checking techniques for the verification of correctness, efficiency and robustness of Control systems (controllers for short). Controllers are small hardware/software components that control the behavior of larger systems, the plants. A controller continuously analyzes the plant state (looking at its state variables) and possibly adjusts some of its parameters (called control variables) to keep the system in a condition called set-point, which usually represents the normal or correct behavior of the system. In the last years, the use of sophisticated controllers has become very common in many fields, e.g. robotics, critical systems and embedded systems (that are contained in a growing number of everyday products and appliances). Therefore, the verification of correctness, efficiency and robustness of controllers is a crucial task.