The activities of this line of research focus on three highly topical areas, and they are declined in different directions in which many researchers in the department are engaged.
In particular, the Smart and Sustainable Cities (SSC) area focuses on the development of solutions for the integrated and intelligent management of urban services and realities, at the metropolitan, neighborhood, or individual building scale, that are likely to make cities resilient, inclusive, and sustainable, anticipating risk factors, including those related to public health.
The Smart and Sustainable Mobility (SSM) area focuses on technologies, strategies, and systems conceived, designed, and developed to improve and innovate personal mobility, especially in urban and metropolitan, but also suburban, contexts, with transportation solutions, including multimodal ones, using tools and technologies for vehicles, especially electric and autonomous ones, in a widespread way.
The Smart and Sustainable Energy (SSE) area includes methodological and application contributions of optimization and control of systems for energy production, transport and distribution; integration of renewable resources and storage in the electrical system; and management and optimization of energy resources and ICT infrastructure and related energy harvesting methods.
Central to each of the three areas is the issue of collecting and processing massive amounts of data from heterogeneous and distributed sources, resulting in interdisciplinary challenges involving all of the department's expertise.
Overall, the activities developed in this line of research will be aimed in the three-year period 2023-25 at achieving significant goals in the three main areas described above, which can further strengthen the role of the DEIB in the national and international scientific community.
In the SSC area, the DEIB will consolidate its role in the future 6G scenario, which will see the interoperability of communication systems on drones, satellites, and fiber optics, focusing on disaster resilience and data privacy issues. In parallel with the development of communication technologies, the line of research on SSCs will be complemented with new remote sensing capabilities (optical, acoustic, and radio) for monitoring human activities (roads, buildings, infrastructures), while monitoring of natural activities (vegetation, deforestation, assessment of the state of snowfields and glaciers, land deformation) will be considered across the three areas (SSC, SSE, SSM) for the development of new terrestrial and satellite remote sensing capabilities. Significant benefits from a joint cost/performance/energy perspective are expected from organizing computation on resources at different levels: from the smart sensor and IoT level, through intermediate processing systems (Edge/Fog/Cloud) to HPC-as-a-Service systems. At the infrastructure level, moreover, the DEIB will contribute to the development of optimization methods for the integrated management of urban resources, considering, for example, the problems of optimal placement of emergency health resources and electric vehicle charging infrastructure, and all related decision-making strategies that take into account technological, economic, and social requirements in an integrated manner. Attention will also be given to the study of opinion dynamics and information propagation, and to all the complex phenomena generated by data and information transmission networks within SSCs. Appropriate emphasis will also be given to data analysis methods to study the connection between public health and the impact of climate change (e.g., heat waves), as well as pollution, assessing through risk analysis what urban and social aspects in large cities might act as triggers or mitigating solutions.
In the SSM area, the DEIB will cover several topics: vehicle technologies (electric, connected and autonomous vehicles); infrastructures (traffic light networks, distributed sensors, etc. ); connectivity (especially 5G and the B5G evolution), geolocation and cybersecurity; interfaces between users and mobility systems; data-analytics (especially cloud-computing) for the prediction and dynamic optimization of mobility resources; and support to the electric grid through enabling flexibility services.
As for SSE, the key objectives relate to optimizing the management and control of new power generation and distribution systems, flexible energy demand as well as modeling and simulation of complex energy systems.
Research in these areas has a strong impact on sustainability. On SSC issues it is particularly related to SDG 11 and, with regard to water resource management and clean energy, SDGs 6-7. Also in the SSC area, the DEIB engages in activities related to social inclusion and development of technologies to support the individual, both from the perspective of people with disabilities and for personalized education based on digital technologies, to support the treatment of mental disorders such as autism through the use of Artificial Intelligence-based solutions (SDG 3-4). The DEIB is also engaged in developing technologies to support gender equality (SDG 5) and studying the ethical implications of technological tools.
In the SSM area, the impact on sustainability is considerable. From the perspective of personal impact, personal mobility efficiency is improved and active and passive safety is increased, contributing to finding innovative solutions that decrease transport poverty, especially in emerging countries, thus also contributing to reducing inequalities between different countries and between urban and rural areas (SDGs 1-10). From an environmental perspective, research in the SSM area contributes to SDG 13 in a significant way.
In SSE, the proposed studies have an immediate impact on sustainability, and particularly on SDG 7 and SDG 11. In addition, future energy diversification and green computing solutions will lead to production efficiency (SDG 9) to the reduction of inequality and energy poverty (SDGs 1-10) through the development of generation systems and networks in disadvantaged territories.
