Luca Faramondi

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at Campus Bio-Medico University

Digital twin development of industrial cyber-physical systems requires modeling, simulation, and monitoring to provide accurate digital replicas mimicking system dynamics. To this aim, modern solutions employ data-driven approaches to capture normal system dynamics using historical data, and anomaly detection using run-time data. However, these app...

In recent years, the increasing Internet connectivity and heterogeneity of industrial protocols have been raising the number and nature of cyber-attacks against Industrial Control Systems (ICS). Such cyber-attacks may lead to cyber anomalies and further to the failure of physical components, thus leading to cyber-physical attacks. In this paper, we...

Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPSs) generate cyber and physical data whose joint elaboration can provide insight into ICPSs' operating conditions. Cyber-Physical Anomaly Detection (CPAD) addresses the joint analysis of cyber and physical threats through multi-source and multi-modal data analysis. CPAD is often tailored to specific anomaly typ...

Italy was the first European country to be significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The lack of similar previous experiences and the initial uncertainty regarding the new virus resulted in an unpredictable health crisis with 243,506 total confirmed cases and 34,997 deaths between February and July 2020. Despite the panorama of precariousnes...

Relative pairwise comparisons represent the cornerstone for several decision-making methods. Such approaches aim to support complex decision-making situations with multiple alternatives and are essential in order to provide an overall absolute evaluation of the alternatives despite the presence of experts and/or decision-makers with conflicting opi...

In this article, we introduce a novel optimization formulation able to capture the main aspects of a networked system affected by faults that reduce the efficiency in terms of flow transmission, as well as to optimize response teams in charge of restoring the subsystems from faults. We propose a nonlinear optimization problem based on the max-flow...

Cyber-attacks against Industrial Control Systems (ICS) can lead to catastrophic events which can be prevented by the use of security measures such as the Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS). In this work we experimentally demonstrate how to exploit the configuration vulnerabilities of SNORT one of the most adopted IPSs to significantly degrade the e...

In the context of decision making, pairwise comparisons matrices (PCMs) based on a ratio scale are essential for deriving absolute preferences from relative comparisons. Such techniques are based on Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), which express their relative judgements on pairs of alternatives, providing pairwise comparison information, also in the...

In this paper we propose a load balancing problem formulation where agents cooperate with the aim of simultaneously minimizing both the workload disparity among the agents and the overall workload transfer, under network capacity constraints. Notably, in our computational setting, the network is not just a device for the distributed solution of an...

This paper presents a dataset to support researchers in the validation process of solutions such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) based on artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for the detection and categorization of threats in Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). To this end, data have been acquired from a hardware-in-the-loop Water...

The construction of large infrastructures (e.g., railways, gas pipelines or power grids) is increasingly facing widespread and violent opposition of radical environmentalist and ideological groups. Therefore, it is necessary to consider also the risk related to violent opposition actions when selecting construction sites. However, the classical par...

From an engineering point of view, the survivability of a system is defined as its ability to continue to operate despite a natural or human-made disturbance; for example a serious mechanical fault, a human error, or a malicious cyber or physical attack. In the context of critical infrastructures, due to their relevance for the public wellness, it...

In this paper we propose an optimal Man-In-The-Middle attack strategy to maliciously manipulate information transmitted from the field to a centralized control unit. The aim of the attacker is to significantly deviate the system’s behavior from its nominal trajectory and, at the same time, avoid that thew attack can be recognized. Specifically, we...

Incomplete pairwise comparison matrices offer a natural way of expressing preferences in decision-making processes. Although ordinal information is crucial, there is a bias in the literature: cardinal models dominate. Ordinal models usually yield nonunique solutions; therefore, an approach blending ordinal and cardinal information is needed. In thi...

This paper provides an implementation of the C-means algorithm in an asynchronous and distributed fashion; specifically, we consider a network of agents, each provided with a piece of information (e.g., data acquired via sensors) and we partition the agents in not mutually exclusive sets such that agents in the same set have similar information; mo...

Spotting criticalities in Critical Infrastructure networks is a crucial task in order to implement effective protection strategies against exogenous or malicious events. Yet, most of the approaches in the literature focus on specific aspects (e.g., presence of hubs, minimum paths) and there is a need to identify tradeoffs among importance metrics t...

In this paper we develop a novel approach to identify the best policy to allocate protection resources to raise the overall network robustness to node disruption. The proposed methodology is based on the identification of the most critical elements of the network in terms of their connectivity contribution to the entire system. The definition of th...

The improvement of workers' safety, especially in complex and potentially dangerous scenario is a mandatory task. To this end, in recent years, there has been a large interest to complement actual passive solutions with IoT based system in order to provide a context related awareness information. Indeed, well informed workers can better manage anom...

Following the Industry/Hospital 4.0 paradigm, the cost and effectiveness of the services offered by a modern Hospital can be dramatically improved by resorting to technology and by putting the patients (and the medical practitioners) at the center, thus improving their care experience (and work time), improving efficiency and paying more attention...

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) consists of the pervasive application of the IoT paradigm in conjunction with analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) in industrial scenarios. Industry 4.0 (I4.0) extends further the IIoT model with the inclusion of robotics and automation, whereas Hospital 4.0 (H4.0) is the application of the I4.0 paradi...

Incomplete pairwise comparison matrices offer a natural way of expressing preferences in decision making processes. Although ordinal information is crucial, there is a bias in the literature: cardinal models dominate. Ordinal models usually yield non-unique solutions; therefore, an approach blending ordinal and cardinal information is needed. In th...

In last decades, thanks to the large diffusion of Information and communications technologies, the cooperation of distributed systems has been facilitated with the aim to provide new services. One of the common aspect of this kind of systems is the presence of a network able to ensure the connectivity among the elements of the network. The connecti...

The relevance of OT (Operational Technology) in Seveso plats has largely increased in recent years thanks to several benefits related to the improvement of efficiency, quality of the production, and cost reduction. Unfortunately, the use of these technologies exposes the plants to cyber threats. Indeed, a cyber-attack may cause the interruption of...

In process industries, including refineries, petrochemical plants, air fractioning plants, Oil and gas depots, there are many hazards for workers (both for employees and contractors). Occupational Hazards include thermal extremes, high concentration of toxic or flammable gas and low concentration of oxygen. These hazards are usually controlled by m...

In this paper, we review some of the main discrete and finite time average consensus implementations in the literature, discussing their strengths and shortcomings from a theoretical and empirical point of view. In particular, we compare the computational characteristics of the different algorithms, their behaviour considering different underlying...

In this paper we develop novel vulnerability metrics for interdependent critical infrastructures or economic sectors based on the concept of controllability. Specifically, we consider the Input-Output Inoperability Model, that represents the dynamics of the dependencies and interdependencies among infrastructures or sectors during an adverse event...

In this paper, we provide a novel framework to assess the vulnerability/robustness of a network with respect to pair-wise nodes' connectivity. In particular, we consider attackers that aim, at the same time, at dealing the maximum possible damage to the network in terms of the residual connectivity after the attack and at keeping the cost of the at...

In the last decade, many efforts have been devoted to indoor localization and positioning. In this paper, a hybrid indoor localization system has been developed within the European project REFIRE for emergency situations. The REFIRE solution estimates the user's pose according to a prediction-correction scheme. The user is equipped with a waist-mou...

It is well known that profiling attacker behavior is an effective way to obtain insights into network attacks and to identify the systems and components that must be protected. This paper presents a novel integer linear program- ming formulation that models the strategy of an attacker who targets a set of nodes with the goal of compromising or dest...

Critical infrastructures are network-based systems which are prone to various types of threats (e.g., terroristic or cyber-attacks). Therefore, it is paramount to devise modelling frameworks to assess their ability to withstand external disruptions and to develop protection strategies aimed at improving their robustness and security. In this paper,...

The identification of Critical Nodes in technological, biological and social networks is a fundamental task in order to comprehend the behavior of such networks and to implement protection or intervention strategies aimed at reducing the network vulnerability. In this paper we focus on the perspective of an attacker that aims at disconnecting the n...

The protection of Critical Infrastructures represents a fundamental topic of interest for the modern societies. The testing in real scenarios is hard to achieve due to the severe interdependence between these critical systems and the human well-being. The paper is devoted to introduce a low-cost testbed developed to emulate a Critical Infrastructur...

This paper aims at exploring a novel approach for indoor localisation by exploiting data fusion. Specifically, personnel localisation in rescue scenarios is addressed: the key idea is to increase the situation awareness of rescuers. A pedestrian dead reckoning algorithm based on waist mounted inertial sensors is designed to cope with different huma...

The independent mobility problem of visually impaired people has been an active research topic in biomedical engineering: although many smart tools have been proposed, traditional tools (e.g., the white cane) continue to play a prominent role. In this paper a low cost smart glove is presented: the key idea is to minimize the impact in using it by c...

Tracking the positions of people in large indoor spaces is important, since it enables a range of applications related to security, indoor navigation and guidance. This paper proposes a personal indoor navigation system based on hybrid map, containing geometric as well as symbolic information. In this way the same map can be exploited to guide and...

In the age of Automation the ability to navigate persons and devices in indoor environments has become increasingly important for a rising number of applications. While Global Positioning System can be considered a mature technology for outdoor localization, there is no off-the-shelf solution for indoor tracking. In this contribution, an infrastruc...

Localization and tracking support is useful in many contexts and becomes crucial in emergency response scenarios: being aware of team location is one of the most important knowledge for incident commander. In this work both localization and tracking for rescuers are addressed in the framework of REFIRE project. The designed positioning system is ba...