Currently Financed Research Projects:
We are currently working at some projects under the larger umbrella of the Shift2Rail (European rail joint technology initiative):
The IT2Rail project is designed as the first step towards the long-term Shift2Rail 4th Innovation Programme “IT Solutions for Attractive Railway Services”. Its main objective is to enable the development of solutions providing a seamless travel experience by giving access to a complete multimodal travel offer, which connects the first and last mile of long distance journeys. IP4’s vision should lead to a dramatic increase in ‘rail attractiveness’, generating sufficient growth in demand to support a major shift to rail, through a seamless travel experience, and a seamless access to all travel services by innovative digital technologies.
IT2Rails looks into a complete door-to-door intermodal journeys encompassing distinct modes of transportation, connecting the first and last mile to long distance journeys combining air, rail, coach and other services. IT2Rail integrates diverse existing and future services for planning, one-stop-shop ticketing and booking transactions, and real-time reaccommodation.
Through the introduction of radical new technologies and solutions, the European citizen’s global travel interactions will be transformed into a fully integrated and customised experience. It will further render the entire European transportation system a natural extension of citizens work and leisure environments, across all modes, local and long-distance, public and private.
All passengers want one thing – get from A to B, quickly and easily. And ideally, while buying only one ticket that combines all the modes.
Good news is that Shift2Rail (European rail joint technology initiative) is already working on this solution for the European market. Within this initiative, several projects develop different elements to make this vision come true.
While the IT2Rail project focuses on the technological part, a new project that kicked off in November 2016 – GOF4R (Governance of the Interoperability Framework for Rail and Intermodal Mobility), will aim at developing conditions to allow this technology to work. As the final objective, GOF4R will contribute to the introduction of seamless mobility services and fostering the development of multimodal travel services as well as a large acceptance of the “semantic web for transportation”.
ST4RT
The objective of the ST4RT (Semantic Transformations for Rail Transportation) project is the research in semantic, ontology based automation of transformations between heterogeneous data formats, and its application to a complex ‘after-sales’ process use case in an actual run-time demonstration scenario.
The technology will leverage Shift2Rail Interoperability Framework (IF) components developed in the IT2Rail “lighthouse” project, extending it for use in the Shift2Rail projects Co-Active, related to Shopping, booking and ticketing of multimodal travel solutions, and ATTRACkTIVE, related to Travel companion and tracking services. The project will additionally provide a case scenario for exercising the Governance and management structure developed under the GoF4R project, related to Governance of the Interoperability Framework, ensuring its market uptake and sustainability.
The objectives will be achieved through a partnership of specialist participants including research institutions, a major European rail operator, industry associations representing the rail sector and public transportation authorities, and industrial providers of mission critical ICT solutions to the rail sector. Participants, which are also involved in the original consortium of designers for the IF in IT2Rail, will perform work organised in specific Work Packages focused on fundamental industrial research in semantic web technologies.
These technologies will comprise ontology engineering and automated semantic transformations, in a dedicated Work Package, to provide the actual runtime demonstration scenario of the application of such technology to transformations of existing European TAP-TSI specification exchanges executed on an existing industrial platform for such exchanges. The project extends the capabilities of the IF as described in the Shift2Rail Multi Annual Action Plan contributing to the realisation of a distributed semantic “web of transport” integrating the TAP-TSI specification as one of its elements.
CAMUS (Context-Aware Mobile mashUpS) is a framework for the design of mobile applications that dynamically collect and integrate heterogeneous resources (data sources and services) to offer integrated content and functions to mobile users in a context-aware fashion.
CAMUS exploits a set of high-level abstractions for context and mashup modeling that hide the complexity resulting from service selection, invocation and integration. Generative techniques then enable the transformation of models into running code for mobile applications that flexibly
respond to actual user needs as they vary in different situations of use. We are going to propose the use of the CAMUS framework within the Shift2Rail ecosystem.
Closed Research Projects:
SHELL – Ecosistemi domestici condivisi e interoperabili per ambienti di vita sostenibili, confortevoli e sicuri
Il contenuto elettronico e informatico di dispositivi ed elettrodomestici nelle abitazioni rende possibile la comunicazione tra oggetti, ma sul mercato le opportunità dell’interconnettività non sono ancora molto diffuse. Obiettivo del progetto SHELL – Ecosistemi domestici condivisi e interoperabili per ambienti di vita sostenibili, confortevoli e sicuri è di realizzare un framework di interoperabilità aperto, libero e accessibile, creando una struttura abilitante per soluzioni in ambiti diversificati e multifunzionali come l’energia, la sicurezza e il comfort. Un ambiente così concepito trasforma la casa in un insieme di ecosistemi condivisi ed interoperabili, modellando la tecnologia sugli occupanti per un ambiente che, accanto alle tradizionali funzionalità domotiche, può produrre quelle azioni e sensazioni che lo rendono più confortevole e a misura di chi lo abita.Il progetto è finanziato dal Ministero dell’Istruzione dell’Università e della Ricerca, all’interno del programma di sviluppo e potenziamento di cluster tecnologici nazionali. I partner di SHELL sono l’Università Politecnica delle Marche, il Politecnico di Milano – Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Bioingegneria, l’Area Science Park – Trieste, il Consorzio Homelab, il Consorzio GENERA, il Distretto Habitech, la Rete High Tech Marche e Telecom Italia. La Fondazione Politecnico di Milano collabora al progetto.
MOTUS – Mobility and Tourism in Urban Scenarios:
MOTUS si propone di migliorare la gestione, la sostenibilità e l’eco-compatibilità della mobilità urbana attraverso un cambiamento di paradigma che metta al centro il cittadino come fruitore e costruttore dei servizi di infomobilità.
A questo scopo MOTUS prevede lo sviluppo di una piattaforma di servizi capace di rilevare, aggregare e interpretare la mobilità urbana in tempo reale a partire da informazioni provenienti da infrastrutture eterogenee esistenti sul territorio e da dati provenienti dai dispositivi mobili presenti nelle aree di interesse. MOTUS sarà in grado elaborare in maniera innovativa i dati di mobilità allo scopo di sviluppare dei modelli di traffico sulla base dei quali costruire servizi di monitoraggio e planning che potranno essere utilizzati per pianificare interventi per il miglioramento di infrastrutture.
GREEN MOVE
Il progetto Green Move, che coinvolge otto centri di ricerca del Politecnico di Milano ed è finanziato dalla Regione Lombardia, si propone di progettare un sistema innovativo di vehicle-sharing con veicoli elettrici leggeri adatti all’uso urbano http://www.greenmove.polimi.it. Uno degli obiettivi di questo progetto è utilizzare le tecnologie ICT contestualizzandole con aspetti di carattere non tecnologico e sviluppare una soluzione integrata e completa che possa aver ricadute in molteplici campi di applicazione. Basandosi sulle moderne reti telematiche digitali (rete Internet), Green Move prevede la presenza di un gestore del sistema che garantisca l’unitarietà del progetto, la gestione dei flussi di informazione e la standardizzazione dei protocolli. Qualunque costruttore, azienda o singolo utente potrà integrare nel sistema i propri veicoli, tramite l’installazione di un piccolo cruscotto elettronico (“green e-box”) e di un sistema standard di “docking” alle stazioni di deposito.
ObiGame
ObiGame mira a prevenire l’obesità infantile e i rischi che ne conseguono, riducendone gli impatti sociali ed economici attraverso l’educazione e la promozione di stili di vita adeguati. Per raggiungere l’obiettivo, integra le best practice mediche con applicazioni videoludiche e app, al fine di coinvolgere le famiglia in un processo personalizzato di miglioramento delle abitudini alimentari e dello stile di vita.
SMSCom
Software is the key enabling technology of our society. Since the early 1970s, there has been a continuous progress in the science and engineering of software, which led to better quality of products. Today, however, emerging requirements are challenging our current knowledge, and require a shift from the incremental improvements we have experienced in the past to radical changes to the way software is conceived, developed, and operated. In particular: Software development and operation are increasingly decentralized. Applications are composed dynamically out of parts that are developed and operated by independent parties. Requirements changes ask for continuous software adaptation and evolution. The infrastructures on which applications run are fully distributed. Technologies like RFID tags, wireless sensors, and embedded devices imply that the infrastructure can change dynamically both in physical and in logical structure. The so-called Internet of Things is fostering a situation where computing power and connectivity are not only possible any-time and any-place, but also for any-thing.
As a consequence, software must behave in a situational, self-managing manner. The term situational indicates that software is built to address a particular situation, problem, or challenge, and behaves according to the evolving situation in which it operates. The term context is also used with a similar meaning, although often with a narrower scope. Examples of situations are: the type of user (its preferences, its knowledge, …), the physical environment (the current location of the executing environment), the computational units that populate the environment at any given time, the devices on which they may run, the environmental conditions (like temperature, light, …). We assume that situational changes are frequent, even continuous, and may require adaptation as the application is running and offering a service. This requires the software to be self-managing. Thus, situational software applications are not static entities, but they must be able to self-adapt to changeable external conditions. Indeed, context-awareness and self-adaptation are central concepts of SMScom, along with the idea of a control loop that propagates the sensed information about situation changes back to a change in the software.
ArtDeco
Description: http://artdeco.elet.polimi.it/images/stories/artdeco-brochure.jpgThe research aims at developing techniques and methods for the diffusion of “networked enterprises” among the Italian Small and Medium Enterprises, testing the proposed approach in association with companies working in two test fields (food and textile/fashion) during all the phases of the project, from the initial definition of requirements to the development of prototypes/demonstrators, through a flexible and iterative process, where the technological development advances together with knowledge acquisition and with the refinement of network mechanisms.
To pursuit such results, the research consists of three, tightly coupled macro-goals: Organization and business models for networked enterprises; Acquisition, modeling and automatic management of business knowledge derived from heterogeneous sources, including natural language; Technological autonomic pervasive infrastructure, based on smart peripheral devices (Wireless Sensor Networks and RFID).
PROMETEO
PROMETEO is a strategic research project of Politecnico di Milano focusing on civil protection and homeland security (public protection) topics. The project, designed in 2005 and activated in 2006, finds out its natural geographic positioning in the Lecco Campus of Politecnico di Milano for the presence of distinctive open air territorial laboratories, such as the alpine valleys of Valtellina and Valsassina (hydrogeological risk) and the nearby urban industrial areas of the Milano Metropolis (industrial, transportation and homeland security risks). The project involves a relevant number of partners, both internal to the Politecnico and external, that have operative and organizing roles. PROMETEO is, by itself, a large container for projects addressing civil protection and homeland security issues. In addition to the projects currently activated, which will be briefly presented in the following, other projects will be subsequently designed and inserted in PROMETEO to address specific requirements from institutions or cover other hot topics in the Public Protection field not presently addressed. PROMETEO is, in its present framework, constituted by seven highly interacting projects. Among these we have two laboratory-projects aiming at defining, developing, verifying and validating ICT, and structural, geotechnical and civil infrastructures applied to the public protection area.
ODISSEY
The ODYSSEY project aims at developing a secure interoperable platform for automated information analysis to combat organised crime and terrorism. This goal is achieved by:
• Creating European Standards for ballistics data collection, storage and sharing
• Setting-up a secure interoperable platform for crime information management and use of ballistics intelligence
• Mining data and extracting knowledge to tackle organised crime and terrorism across the EU
• Exploiting automated and semi-automated processing and analysis of data for generation of ‘Red Flags’ situation awareness by automated analysis of complex, different cultural/domain data with multiple reference models
• Adopting new and improved methods for the detection of micro and nano forensic information that supplement current approaches
• Enhancing mutual co-operation, security and sustainability across the EU
ESTEEM Emergent Semantics and cooperaTion in multi-knowledgE EnvironMents – Advanced methods and tools for semantic cooperation in Web virtual communities
The main goal of the ESTEEM project is the design and the implementation of a platform for emergent semantics in multi-knowledge environments, where semantic communities can interoperate according to the P2P paradigm. The ESTEEM platform provides a comprehensive framework for data and service integration in P2P systems, and advanced solutions for consensus-driven construction of semantic communities, trust and quality management, P2P physical infrastructure design, and context-aware query processing, dynamic service discovery, composition and matching. Indeed, since parties of a semantic communities may be dislocated in different contexts and may need to access data through heterogeneous devices, the ESTEEM platform provides features for mobile and ubiquitous information access and storage, and multichannel delivery. Techniques and solutions provided by the ESTEEM platform are deployed as Web services on the reference P2P middleware architecture and demonstrated in the application scenario of scientific collaboration in medicine.