Showing papers by "Federica Mandreoli published in 2019"

A Conceptual Architecture and Model for Smart Manufacturing Relying on Service-Based Digital Twins

Abstract: The technological foundation of smart manufacturing consists of cyber-physical systems and the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Each IoT device in a smart factory can be coupled with a digital twin, that is, a dynamic virtual representation of the physical system across its life-cycle using real-time sensor data. Currently, the manufacturing process itself, the involved devices, and how they interact, is designed by human experts in a traditional way. We envision an architecture where humans can instead specify a goal and take advantage of technologies such as digital twins to automatically compose the corresponding physical processes, sharing some analogies with the notion of Web service composition

Dealing With Data Heterogeneity in a Data Fusion Perspective: Models, Methodologies, and Algorithms

Abstract: Dealing with multiple manifestations of the same real-world entity across several data sources is a very common challenge for many modern applications, including life science applications. This challenge is referenced as data heterogeneity in the data management research field where the final aim is often to get a unified or integrated view of the real-world entities represented in the data sources. Data heterogeneity is a long-standing challenge that has attracted much interest in different computer science disciplines. The main aim of the chapter is to show how data heterogeneity problems that are typical of life science application contexts can be afforded by adopting systematic solutions stemming from the computer science field. To this end, it focusses on the main sources of heterogeneity in the life science context, presents the main problems that arise when dealing with heterogeneity, and provides a review of the solutions proposed in the computer science literature.

Employee Attitudes and (Digital) Collaboration Data: A Preliminary Analysis in the HRM Field

Abstract: The digital transformation of organizations is making workplace collaboration more and more powerful and work always "observable"; however, the informational and managerial potential of the generated data is still largely unutilized in Human Resource Management (HRM). Our research, conducted in collaboration with business engineers and economists, aims at exploring the relationship between digital work behaviors and employee attitudes. This paper is a work-in-progress contribution that presents a preliminary phase of data analysis we performed on a collection of Enterprise Collaboration Software (ECS) data. In the exploratory data analysis step, we analyze data in their original table format and elaborate it according to the user who performed the action and the performed action. Then, we move to a graph representation in order to make explicit the interaction between users and the objects of their actions. Finally, we introduce the concept of employee-attitude-oriented pattern as a mean to derive significant views over the overall graph and discuss Social Network Analysis (SNA) approaches that can be exploited for our purposes.

Towards Patient-Centric Healthcare: Multi-Version Ontology-Based Personalization of Clinical Guidelines

Abstract: Retrieving personalized care plans from a guideline repository is an ever-increasing need in the medical world, not only for physicians but also for empowered patients. In this chapter, we continue our long-lasting research on ontology-based personalized access to very large collections of multi-version documents by addressing a novel challenge: dealing with multi-version clinical guidelines but also with a multi-version ontology used to support personalized access to them. Efficiency is ensured by a newly introduced annotation scheme for guidelines and solutions to cope with the evolution of ontology structure. The tests performed on a prototype implementation confirm the goodness of the approach. Finally, the chapter proposes an exhaustive analysis of the state of the art in this field and, in the final part, a discussion where we expand our vision to related research themes and possible further developments of our work.

An Architectural Approach for Digital Factories.

Abstract: Digital factories comprise a multi-layered integration of various activities along the factories and product life-cycles. A central aspect of a digital factory is that of enabling the product lifecycle stakeholders to collaborate through the use of software solutions. The digital factory expands outside the company boundaries and allows to collaborate on business processes over the whole supply chain. This extended abstract, based on a recently published paper, discusses an interoperability architecture for digital factories. It analyses the key requirements for enabling a scalable factory architecture characterized by access to services, aggregation of data, and orchestration of production processes.