Autonomous, self-adaptive, and smart systems
Autonomous and smart systems are more and more required to cooperate and collaborate each other and with human actors, and, in general, they need to operate in environemnts shared with humans. In this digital society, humans feel unprotected and unsafe, constrained by technology; values like safety, fairness, ethics and privacy are at risk. From some years, we investigate techniques and methodologies aiming at better balancing of forces: we will no longer need to accept the opaque behavior of the software technologies, rather, we will provide effective means to mold these technologies into shapes that better reflect our human values (see the Exosoul project).
Robotic Software engineering
We are pioneers in establishing the discipline of robotic software engineering for service robots. We investigated safety aspects and the readiness of using robotis in real life scenarios, software variability in service robotics, architectures for the coordination of heterogeneous robots, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) for service robotics, synthesis of controllers of a planners under uncertainty.
We also offered solutions for democratizing robots in everyday-life scenarios. We identified and formulated mission specification patterns and mission specification patterns for quantitative properties to enable the specification of mission in structured English and, then, an automatic translation in temporal logic. We also contributed a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for mission specification, called Promise.
Architecting complex system
We have consolidated experience in languages for providing architecture descriptions and in architecture frameworks (ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011).
We investigated the definition of an architecture framework for Volvo Cars and the definition of a viewpoint for cars as constituents of a System of Systems (SoS).
We also investigated the role of architectures when companies are in the transition towards the adoption of agile methodologies.
