Environment, society and economy of an early medieval river: the late Lombard and Carolingian Po Valley (northern Italy), 715-924 AD

This PhD thesis is focused on the different uses and meanings of rivers and freshwater for early medieval societies. It is based on a specific case study, the Po valley (northern Italy) between the eighth and the long ninth centuries AD. This period and geographical region have been mostly analysed by Italian and international historiography as it is one of the richest areas in term of documentary availability and has a complex socio-political and economic landscape very difficult to retrace in other parts of central and northern Europe. I have approached the analysis of this landscape starting from a natural element the river and its uses, highlighted its early medieval environmental patterns and used these to understand how these influenced the socio-economic trends of the period between the Lombard and the Carolingian dominations. My aims are in fact to reconstruct and analyse the ‘riverscape’ recognising how far it is possible to distinguish between specific characteristics linked to the different kingships that ruled northern Italy and more local patterns. In my research I conducted an interdisciplinary analysis between History and Archaeology, taking account also on the geoenvironmental data available for the landscape. This methodological approach brought to light a more complete spectrum of the riverscape highlighting different angles and perspectives. Finally it has been possible to a) achieve the complete reconstruction of the early medieval historical landscape, b) recognise the elements that characterised Lombard, Carolingian and local patterns along the river and its water, and c) recognise the circuits of men and goods that lived on the river and contributed to the formation of the Po valley riverscape

A Framework for the Design and Simulation of Embedded Vision Applications Based on OpenVX and ROS

Customizing computer vision applications for embedded systems is a common and widespread problem in the cyber-physical systems community. Such a customization means parametrizing the algorithm by considering the external environment and mapping the Software application to the heterogeneous Hardware resources by satisfying non-functional constraints like performance, power, and energy consumption. This work presents a framework for the design and simulation of embedded vision applications that integrates the OpenVX standard platform with the Robot Operating System (ROS). The paper shows how the framework has been applied to tune the ORB-SLAM application for an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 board by considering different environment contexts and different design constraints

Environment, society and economy of an early medieval river: the late Lombard and Carolingian Po Valley (northern Italy), 715-924 AD

This PhD thesis is focused on the different uses and meanings of rivers and freshwater for early medieval societies. It is based on a specific case study, the Po valley (northern Italy) between the eighth and the long ninth centuries AD. This period and geographical region have been mostly analysed by Italian and international historiography as it is one of the richest areas in term of documentary availability and has a complex socio-political and economic landscape very difficult to retrace in other parts of central and northern Europe. I have approached the analysis of this landscape starting from a natural element the river and its uses, highlighted its early medieval environmental patterns and used these to understand how these influenced the socio-economic trends of the period between the Lombard and the Carolingian dominations. My aims are in fact to reconstruct and analyse the ‘riverscape’ recognising how far it is possible to distinguish between specific characteristics linked to the different kingships that ruled northern Italy and more local patterns. In my research I conducted an interdisciplinary analysis between History and Archaeology, taking account also on the geoenvironmental data available for the landscape. This methodological approach brought to light a more complete spectrum of the riverscape highlighting different angles and perspectives. Finally it has been possible to a) achieve the complete reconstruction of the early medieval historical landscape, b) recognise the elements that characterised Lombard, Carolingian and local patterns along the river and its water, and c) recognise the circuits of men and goods that lived on the river and contributed to the formation of the Po valley riverscape

L'esperienza di PAT e PI al vaglio del giudice amministrativo

Rassegna di giurisprudenza del TAR Veneto sui nuovi strumenti di pianificazione territoriale comunale del PAT e del PI, introdotti a seguito della riforma urbanistica regionale (L.R. Veneto n. 11/2004

From Multi-Level to Abstract-Based Simulation of a Production Line

This paper proposes two approaches for the integration of cyber-physical systems in a production line in order to obtain predictions concerning the actual production, core operation in the context of Industry 4.0. The first approach relies on the Multi-Level paradigm where multiple descriptions of the same CPS are modeled with different levels of details. Then, the models are switched at runtime. The second approach relies on abstraction techniques of CPS maintaining a certain levels of details. The two approaches are validated and compared with a real use case scenario to identify the most effective simulation strategy

Cyber-physical Systems Integration in a Production Line Simulator

Digital Twin represents a simulated model of a production line which allows making analyses of future states concerning the real factory. More in details, these analyses are related to the variability of production quality, prediction of the maintenance cycle, the accurate estimation of energy consumption and other extra-functional properties of the system. This is the core of what is so called Industry 4.0. Every single node of the manufacturing process needs to be modelled as a Cyber-physical system to be able to make the mentioned analyses. However, Manufacturing simulators represent these systems with a high level of abstraction, making impossible precise analyses. In the state of the art, some solutions try to solve the problem connecting multiple domain-specific simulators, to preserve details but requiring complex co-simulation environments. This paper presents a methodology for the integration of Cyber-Physical Systems in production line simulators, avoiding these issues. The proposed solution is based on a new promising technology: the Function Mockup Interface (FMI). This standard defines an interface to exports models as blocks called Functional Mockup Units (FMUs). These FMUs can be easily integrated together composing heterogeneous systems. The methodology is composed of two steps: 1) Exporting Digital and Physical systems as different FMUs 2) Integration of the FMUs into a production line simulator. A running example is used to validate our solution which clearly shows the limitations of the production line simulator without the integration of CPSs. This paper aims at producing Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) to make more accurate simulations, and hence more accurate analysis of the production line

A Container-based Design Methodology for Robotic Applications on Kubernetes Edge-Cloud architectures

Programming modern Robots’ missions and behav- ior has become a very challenging task. The always increasing level of autonomy of such platforms requires the integration of multi-domain software applications to implement artificial intelligence, cognition, and human-robot/robot-robot interaction applications. In addition, to satisfy both functional and non- functional requirements such as reliability and energy efficiency, robotic SW applications have to be properly developed to take advantage of heterogeneous (Edge-Fog-Cloud) architectures. In this context, containerization and orchestration are becoming a standard practice as they allow for better information flow among different network levels as well as increased modularity in the use of software components. Nevertheless, the adoption of such a practice along the design flow, from simulation to the deployment of complex robotic applications by addressing the de-facto development standards (i.e., robotic operating system - ROS - compliancy for robotic applications) is still an open problem. We present a design methodology based on Docker and Kubernetes that enables containerization and orchestration of ROS-based robotic SW applications for heterogeneous and hierarchical HW architectures. The design methodology allows for (i) integration and verification of multi-domain components since early in the design flow, (ii) task-to-container mapping techniques to guarantee minimum overhead in terms of perfor- mance and memory footprint, and (iii) multi-domain verification of functional and non-functional constraints before deployment. We present the results obtained in a real case of study, in which the design methodology has been applied to program the mission of a Robotnik RB-Kairos mobile robot in an industrial agile production chain

A Design Flow based on Docker and Kubernetes for ROS-based Robotic Software Applications

Human-centered robotic applications are becoming pervasive in the context of robotics and smart manufacturing and such a pervasiveness is even more expected with the shift to Industry 5.0. The always increasing level of autonomy of modern robotic platforms requires the integration of software applications from different domains to implement artificial intelligence, cognition, and human- robot/robot-robot interaction. Developing and (re)configuring such a multi-domain software to meet functional constraints is a challenging task. Even more challenging is customizing the software to satisfy non-functional requirements such as real-time, reliability, and energy efficiency. In this context, the concept of Edge-Cloud continuum is gaining consensus as a solution to address functional and non-functional constraints in a seamless way. Containerization and orchestration are becoming a standard practice as they allow for better information flow among different network levels as well as increased modularity in the use of multi-domain software components. Nevertheless, the adoption of such a practice along the design flow, from simulation to the deployment of complex robotic applications by addressing the de-facto development standards (e.g., ROS - Robotic Operating System) is still an open problem. We present a design methodology based on Docker and Kubernetes that enables containerization and orchestration of ROS-based robotic SW applications for heterogeneous and hierarchical HW architectures. The methodology aims at (i) integrating and verifying multi-domain components since early in the design flow, (ii) mapping software tasks to containers to minimize the performance and memory footprint overhead, (iii) clustering containers to efficiently distribute load across the edge-cloud architecture by minimizing resource utilization, and (iv) enabling multi-domain verification of functional and non-functional constraints before deployment. The article presents the results obtained with a real case of study, in which the design methodology has been applied to program the mission of a Robotnik RB-Kairos mobile robot in an industrial agile production chain. We have obtained reduced load on the robot’s HW with minimal performance and network overhead thanks to the optimized distributed system

A Software Architecture to Control Service-Oriented Manufacturing Systems

This paper presents a software architecture extending the classical automation pyramid to control and reconfigure flexible, service-oriented manufacturing systems. At the Planning level, the architecture requires a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) consistent with the International Society of Automation (ISA) standard. Then, the Supervisory level is automated by introducing a novel component, called Automation Manager. The new component interacts upward with the MES, and downward with a set of servers providing access to the manufacturing machines. The communication with machines relies on the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) standard protocol, which allows exposing production tasks as “services”. The proposed software architecture has been prototyped to control a real production line, originally controlled by a commercial MES, unable to fully exploit the flexibility provided by the case study manufacturing system. Meanwhile, the proposed architecture is fully exploiting the production line's flexibility

A Design Methodology of Multi-level Digital Twins

This paper proposes a design methodology of Digital Twins enabling multi-level simulation of equipment in a manufacturing plant. In this context, the Digital Twin covers a central role where it can perform analysis of the current state of the plant and, more importantly, prediction regarding its future state. This requires the use of complex models for all the nodes that compose the entire production, to obtain a more accurate estimation of future equipment states. Furthermore, most of the commercial tools provided by different vendors do not consider this dimension of the problem and allows to perform simulations of the plant with a very high level of abstraction, or with the use of statistical approximation. On the other hand, several physical process simulators allow to model and simulate single equipment, but without considering the production line perspective. Multi-Level modeling considers different levels of abstraction of the same model, allowing to switch from a model to another. This paper proposes a design flow methodology based on multi-level approach, that allows to obtain a unique environment where physical and production simulators are integrated automatically. The entire design flow is validated with a real use case scenario. The obtained results show different simulation strategies using multi-level approach with different synchronization granularity