Stima di una cost-efficiency frontier e valutazione della qualità per l’offerta di servizi sociali: il caso del servizio asilo nido in Italia

(non presente

Infrastructure (Resilience-oriented) Modelling Language: I®M - A proposal for modelling infrastructures and their connections

The modelling of critical infrastructures (CIs) is an important issue that needs to be properly addressed, for several reasons. It is a basic support for making decisions about operation and risk reduction. It might help in understanding high-level states at the system-of-systems layer, which are not ready evident to the organisations that manage the lower level technical systems. Moreover, it is also indispensable for setting a common reference between operator and authorities, for agreeing on the incident scenarios that might affect those infrastructures. So far, critical infrastructures have been modelled ad-hoc, on the basis of knowledge and practice derived from less complex systems. As there is no theoretical framework, most of these efforts proceed without clear guides and goals and using informally defined schemas based mostly on boxes and arrows. Different CIs (electricity grid, telecommunications networks, emergency support, etc) have been modelled using particular schemas that were not directly translatable from one CI to another. If there is a desire to build a science of CIs it is because there are some observable commonalities that different CIs share. Up until now, however, those commonalities were not adequately compiled or categorized, so building models of CIs that are rooted on such commonalities was not possible. This report explores the issue of which elements underlie every CI and how those elements can be used to develop a modelling language that will enable CI modelling and, subsequently, analysis of CI interactions, with a special focus on resilience.JRC.DG.G.6-Security technology assessmen

A modelling language for the resilience assessment of networked systems of systems

Systems of Systems (SoS) present challenging features and existing tools result often inadequate for their analysis, especially for heteregeneous networked infrastructures. Most accident scenarios in networked systems cannot be addressed by a simplistic black or white (i.e. functioning or failed) approach. Slow deviations from nominal operation conditions may cause degraded behaviours that suddenly end up into unexpected malfunctioning, with large portions of the network affected. In this paper,we present a language for modelling networked SoS. The language makes it possible to represent interdependencies of various natures, e.g. technical, organizational and human. The representation of interdependencies is based on control relationships that exchange physical quantities and related information. The language also makes it possible the identification of accident scenarios, by representing the propagation of failure events throughout the network. The results can be used for assessing the effectiveness of those mechanisms and measures that contribute to the overall resilience, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. The presented modelling methodology is general enough to be applied in combination with already existing system analysis techniques, such as risk assessment, dependability and performance evaluatio

Infrastructure (Resilience-oriented) Modelling Language: I®ML A proposal for modelling infrastructures and their connections

The modelling of critical infrastructures (CIs) is an important issue that needs to be properly addressed, for several reasons. It is a basic support for making decisions about operation and risk reduction. It might help in understanding high-level states at the system-of-systems layer, which are not ready evident to the organisations that manage the lower level technical systems. Moreover, it is also indispensable for setting a common reference between operator and authorities, for agreeing on the incident scenarios that might affect those infrastructures. So far, critical infrastructures have been modelled ad-hoc, on the basis of knowledge and practice derived from less complex systems. As there is no theoretical framework, most of these efforts proceed without clear guides and goals and using informally defined schemas based mostly on boxes and arrows. Different CIs (electricity grid, telecommunications networks, emergency support, etc) have been modelled using particular schemas that were not directly translatable from one CI to another. If there is a desire to build a science of CIs it is because there are some observable commonalities that different CIs share. Up until now, however, those commonalities were not adequately compiled or categorized, so building models of CIs that are rooted on such commonalities was not possible. This report explores the issue of which elements underlie every CI and how those elements can be used to develop a modelling language that will enable CI modelling and, subsequently, analysis of CI interactions, with a special focus on resilienc

Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan: a Healthcare Renaissance after the COVID-19 crisis?

: Proposed for the first time by European Commission in May 2020, the "NextGenerationEU" (NGEU) program is the European Union's most important effort to address key issues relating to public health and healthcare, digital and technological innovation, climate change, sustainable mobility, and key sociocultural aspects. In addition, the NGEU represents a response to the COVID-19 crisis through an extremely powerful financial intervention (over 800 billion euros). Italy is one of the main recipients of the NGEU plan's resources with almost 200 billion euros received in grants and loans. Implementation of the NGEU in Italy will take place through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). The NRRP not only describes how the NGEU resources will be used, but it singles out crucial public law reforms in national legislation and organization. Unsurprisingly, public health intervention represents a major component of the NRRP. Here we summarize and discuss the rules, regulations and perspective envisaged by the NRRP to foster effective healthcare and to reshape the Italian National Health System through the redesigning of primary care, enhanced communication between hospital and community healthcare, and stronger implementation of digital technologies in public health. (www.actabiomedica.it)

Revising the legislation of Ethics Committees to ease biomedical research in humans across the world: lessons from the COVID-19 emergency

: As a legislative domain that considerably influences implementation of biomedical research, the need to improve the legal rules surrounding the organization and functioning of Ethics Committees in public health, toxicology, and clinical medicine is widely recognized within and outside the European Union. Given the often-heard complaints by researchers about the complexity and length of both the application and the review process by Ethics Committees in the authorization of new studies, adjustments to their legislation appears to be warranted. Within the European Union this seems also all the timelier, given the upcoming new regulation of clinical trials to become effective in early 2022. For this process, valuable lessons can be gleaned from the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes in the functioning of Ethics Committees that were adopted to cope with the exceptional circumstances imposed by the health emergency. The pandemic experience clearly indicates that a more responsive and practical system of applications' review by the Ethics Committees can be squared with acceptable levels of transparency and reliability in ethical accountability. For this reason, countries like Italy should consider undertaking a significant revision of the public law rules that govern the review processes of Ethics Committees in light of the pandemic experience. (www.actabiomedica.it)

Resilience analysis of networked systems-of-systems based on structural and dynamic interdependencies

Critical infrastructures support everyday activities in modern societies, facilitating the exchange of services and quantities of various nature. Their functioning is the result of the integration of diverse technologies, systems and organizations into a complex network of interconnections. Benefits from networking are accompanied by new threats and risks. In particular, because of the increased interdependency, disturbances and failures may propagate and render unstable the whole infrastructure network. This paper presents a methodology of resilience analysis of networked systems of systems. Resilience generalizes the concept of stability of a system around a state of equilibrium, with respect to a disturbance and its ability of preventing, resisting and recovery. The methodology provides a tool for the analysis of off-equilibrium conditions that may occur in a single system and propagate through the network of dependencies. The analysis is conducted in two stages. The first stage of the analysis is qualitative. It identifies the resilience scenarios, i.e. the sequence of events, triggered by an initial disturbance, which include failures and the system response. The second stage is quantitative. The most critical scenarios can be simulated, for the desired parameter settings, in order to check if they are successfully handled, i.e recovered to nominal conditions, or they end into the network failure. The proposed methodology aims at providing an effective support to resilience-informed design

Public health and public law issues for the toxicological risk assessment of chemical mixtures

Humans are simultaneously exposed to a near-infinite number of substances of both nutritional and toxicological interest. While traditional risk assessment has been based on the evaluation of effects of single substances, real-life exposure is characterized by their combination into chemical mixtures. As consequence, the need to focus on substance interactions is of considerable relevance. From the public health point of view, factors able to modulate the kinetic and toxicity of chemicals need to be included in the assessment of health effects. Several European projects including SOLUTIONS, EuroMix, ECD-MixRisk and HBM4EU have been implemented aiming at the characterization of hazardous properties of chemical mixtures and the development of new approaches and tools for their risk assessment, including advanced statistical methodologies. From the public law point of view, the legislative status of mixtures is outlined in a still general way, with a specific focus on a few substances only, e.g. dietary exposure to pesticide residues. Although some advances have been made with the ongoing revision of CLP Regulation specifically focusing also on chemical mixtures, identification of mixtures and the regulation of their use raise relevant and challenging issues to be timely addressed within a collaboration of specialists from toxicology, public health, and public law. Moreover, given the transnational scope of the problem, risk assessment of chemical mixtures presents a valuable occasion for a comparative law approach

Towards the dismissal of null hypothesis/statistical significance testing in public health, public law and toxicology

Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) text was once widely popular and almost systematically used for the identification of causal relations and for risk assessment in toxicology and medicine. Interestingly, the public law world has been more prudent and more advanced than the biomedical one in the use of this dichotomous approach, based on the conventional p-value cut-points of 0.05/0.001, to assess causality. The recent 2016 statement by the American Statistical Association, the joint action by methodologists in all fields of science, and not least the seminal decisions by the US Supreme Court have highlighted the pitfalls of the dichotomous approach embedded in NHST. Overall, they also indicated the need to entirely dismiss NHST when assessing causal relations, favoring instead a more flexible and adequate approach for data analysis and interpretation. The demise of statistical significance testing would have major beneficial implications for risk assessment in toxicology, public health, and human medicine, alongside important public law implications. It could also lead to a reanalysis and re-interpretation of previous studies and bodies of evidence that may have been inaccurately assessed due to the flaws inherent in NHST

Risk assessment methodologies for Critical Infrastructure Protection. Part I: A state of the art

Effective risk assessment methodologies are the cornerstone of a successful Critical Infrastructure Protection program. The extensive number of risk assessment methodologies for critical infrastructures clearly supports this argument. Risk assessment is indispensable in order to identify threats, assess vulnerabilities and evaluate the impact on assets, infrastructures or systems taking into account the probability of the occurrence of these threats. This is a critical element that differentiates a risk assessment from a typical impact assessment methodologyJRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen