Heatwaves, have been made more frequent and intense in the last decades due to climate change and have been severely impacting the population, especially vulnerable ones, causing illness, death and impact on productivity. Heatwaves and their consequences are worst in urban areas that become islands of higher temperatures, usually refereed to as urban heat islands, UHI. In the framework of the European Commission-funded research project ARCH: Advancing Resilience of historic areas against Climate-related and other Hazards this phenomenon has been analyzed with special focus on historic and cultural heritage areas. This paper proposes an easy to be implemented procedure to provide to local administrations and stakeholders readable and easy to be understood information on the location of UHI within the territory and the induced risks of impact on the population, enabling them to take informed decisions on possible and effective mitigation strategies. The proposed procedures use satellite thermal maps to quantify the thermal hazard within the analysed territory in the first instance; the exposure to UHI effect in terms of location and severity of possible urban islands within the city is evaluated by considering both the land cover and the population. A social vulnerability assessment is then performed based on age and economic indicators readily available from census data. Using a fuzzy overlay approach all the above-mentioned assessments are combined to estimate the risk for possible impacts to the population induced by heatwaves.

We discuss our experience with the design, implementation, deployment and evaluation of a Human Activity Detection application. This application relies on a software architecture for IoT-based monitoring in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), based on a Semantic Message Oriented Middleware (SeMoM). Going beyond traditional sensor management systems, our architecture addresses the heterogeneity challenge in IoT healthcare systems and ensures semantic and technical interoperability. SeMoM is able to handle the data acquisition process for a variety of heterogeneous devices, and to provide a reasoning mechanism based on expert knowledge and logic through cognitive sensors. Sensor data and observations are annotated using an extended version of the Cognitive Semantic Sensor Network (CoSSN) ontology built on top of the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology. CoSSN provides a formal representation that supports a semantic detection of activities.

Ensuring deadlock freedom is one of the most critical requirements in the design and validation of concurrent systems. The biggest challenge toward the development of effective deadlock detection schemes remains the state-space explosion problem when model checking is used for proving the correctness of a system with respect to a desired behavior. In this paper we propose the use of the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to reduce the state explosion problem arising when finding deadlocks in complex networks described using Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS). Moreover, ACO is used to provide minimal counterexamples. In fact, although one of the strongest advantages of model checking is the generation of counterexamples when verification fails, traditional model checkers may return very long counterexamples. We present an implementation of our technique and encouraging experimental results on several benchmarks. These results are then compared with other heuristic-based search strategies, retaining the advantages of our approach.

Abstract In this paper, we propose a bottom‐up approach for the verification of systems with modular structure: we prove that when the modules are composed in specific ways, the complete software system verifies a composition of the properties each component does. We focus on the process of upgrading systems with new functionalities, where the validity of old requirements needs to be ensured, but also an understanding of the new properties the upgraded system would enjoy is useful. In this work, we assume each component to be specified by a CCS process, and the properties to be expressed by selective mu‐calculus formulae. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Web services are rapidly changing the landscape of software engineering. One of the most interesting challenges introduced by web services is represented by Quality Of Service (QoS)--aware composition and late--binding. This allows to bind, at run--time, a service--oriented system with a set of services that, among those providing the required features, meet some non--functional constraints, and optimize criteria such as the overall cost or response time. In other words, QoS--aware composition can be modeled as an optimization problem.We propose to adopt Genetic Algorithms to this aim. Genetic Algorithms, while being slower than integer programming, represent a more scalable choice, and are more suitable to handle generic QoS attributes. The paper describes our approach and its applicability, advantages and weaknesses, discussing results of some numerical simulations.

Run-time service discovery and late-binding constitute some of the most challenging issues of service-oriented software engineering. For late-binding to be effective in the case of composite services, a QoS-aware composition mechanism is needed. This means determining the set of services that, once composed, not only will perform the required functionality, but also will best contribute to achieve the level of QoS promised in service level agreements (SLAs). However, QoS-aware composition relies on estimated QoS values and workflow execution paths previously obtained using a monitoring mechanism. At run-time, the actual QoS values may deviate from the estimations, or the execution path may not be the one foreseen. These changes could increase the risk of breaking SLAs and obtaining a poor QoS. Such a risk could be avoided by replanning the service bindings of the workflow slice still to be executed. This paper proposes an approach to trigger and perform composite service replanning during execution. An evaluation has been performed simulating execution and replanning on a set of composite service workflows.

The use of workflow technology to provide automated support to the management and execution of software engineering processes has become of great interest for large software companies that nowadays are moving towards the new model of "virtual" organizations. Therefore, workflow systems that allow co-operation among team members in a distributed environment are now a primary concern. In this paper we present a new workflow management system, named FlowManager, which has all the potential to be used in such application domain. FlowManager, in fact, will be a component of a larger European GENESIS project (Generalized Environment for Process Management in Cooperative Software Engineering), whose objective is to develop a non-invasive and open source environment for modeling software engineering processes and managing co-operation among geographically distributed teams.

The paper presents a new application of content management based on a peer-to-peer platform. Several advantages following our choice of the peer-to-peer paradigm within the content management context are discussed, such as the improved scalability and flexibility of the system and the preserved ownership and off-line control of content from content creators.