Roberto Setola

Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma | unicampus · Complex Systems & Security Lab

COVID-19 has changed the very way we live our lives, from how we learn and work to how we interact. It has also brought a number of challenges including the management of building utilities under such conditions. In fact, during a lockdown, it makes sense to allocate the available resources based on the density of population, e.g., preferring resid...

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...

Recently, the ever-growing interest in the continuous monitoring of heart function in out-of-laboratory settings for an early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases has led to the investigation of innovative methods for cardiac monitoring. Among others, wearables recording seismic waves induced on the chest surface by the mechanical activity of the h...

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...

The call for integrated management of safety and security (IMSS) derives from intensification of digitalisation development and the increased reliance on information communication technologies (ICT) in high-risk industries, such as the chemical and process industry. This development means tightened interconnectedness between industrial automation a...

Automatic decision support systems are typically based on objective data and rely on data-driven techniques such as machine learning. Yet, in order to take effective decisions, it is fundamental to incorporate also experience-driven approaches that are able to leverage on the experience of human decision makers and experts. However, there is a need...

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 develops a framework to track the trajectory of a target in 2D by considering a moving ownship able to measure bearing measurements. Notably, the framework allows one to incorporate additional information (e.g., obtained via intelligence) such as knowledge on the fact the target’s trajectory is contained in the intersection of some sets...

Early diagnosis can be crucial to limit both the mortality and economic burden of cardiovascular diseases. Recent developments have focused on the continuous monitoring of cardiac activity for a prompt diagnosis. Nowadays, wearable devices are gaining broad interest for a continuous monitoring of the heart rate (HR). One of the most promising metho...

The introduction of IoT (Internet of Things) in work environments has the potential to revolutionise the industrial scenario. Among others, IoT technologies have the capability to innovate the customer experience, to improve the effectiveness and accuracy of the process, to identify in the early stages possible problems and/or defects, to enhance t...

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...

Cybersecurity has become an emerging challenge for business information management and critical infrastructure protection in recent years. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been widely used in different fields, but it is still relatively new in the area of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) security. In this paper, we provide an approach based on Machine...

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...

The ‘human factor’ is commonly considered to be the weakest link in an organization’s security chain, and a significant percentage of companies have implemented security awareness (SA) programs to address this vulnerability. However, an element whose usefulness is still underestimated is the importance to perform measurements of the different SA pr...

L’Ue, attraverso il finanziamento di progetti volti a migliorare l’interoperabilità nelle attività di salvataggio e di protezione civile, ha consentito alle autorità competenti di migliorare i loro sistemi di risposta in caso di emergenze complesse o su vasta scala, anche nel caso della pandemia covid-19 https://www.agendadigitale.eu/infrastruttur...

The Italian National Fire and Rescue Services (CNVVF) has been participating since 2006 to EU research projects aimed at improving rescue services through the design, development and implementation of enhanced capacity for data exchange. The most important result of such projects is the possibility to manage complex and large-scale emergencies usin...

Background: The detection of epidural space is usually performed by the technique of loss of resistance (LOR) without technological support, although there are few commercial options. In this work, we aimed to assess the feasibility of a new, non-invasive, mechatronic system for LOR detection in clinical settings. The system allows monitoring the...

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...

Assessing critical infrastructure vulnerabilities is paramount to arrange efficient plans for their protection. Critical infrastructures are network-based systems hence, they are composed of nodes and edges. The literature shows that node criticality, which is the focus of this paper, can be addressed from different metric-based perspectives (e.g.,...

The security of critical infrastructures is of paramount importance nowadays due to the growing complexity of components and applications. This paper collects the contributions to the industry dissemination session within the 14th International Conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security (CRITIS 2019). As such, it provides an overvi...

IoT (Internet of Things) technologies are wide spreading in several industrial sector due to a combination of increasing technical performance together with decreasing purchase prices: thus, new tools are been evaluated for adoption in new fields of application, like safety at work. In recent years, several projects and prototypes as well as indust...

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...

Present day high speed rail systems (HSRS) operate under permanent risk of criminal and terrorist attacks. HSRS security threats require special attention and immediate responses. The purpose of this research is to develop a method for remote rapid response to HSRS transportation security threats. The method is based on the employment of automated...

The security of critical infrastructures is of a paramount importance nowadays due to the growing complexity of components and applications. This paper collects the contributions to the industry dissemination session within the 14th International Conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security (CRITIS 2019). As such, it provides an over...

This paper proposes an asynchronous gossip framework where agents move according to independent random walks over a location graph and interactions may occur only when two agents share the same location. Our goal is to investigate how average consensus may be achieved when agents’ motion occurs over a set of discrete locations with topological cons...

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...

Industry 4.0 advent opens several cyber-threats scenarios originally designed for classic information technology (IT), drawing the attention to serious risks for the modern industrial control networks. To cope with this problem, in this paper, we address the security issues related to covert channels applied to industrial networks, identifying the...

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...

The aim of the sparse analytic hierarchy process (SAHP) problem is to rank a set of alternatives based on their utility/importance; this task is accomplished by asking human decision-makers to compare selected pairs of alternatives and to specify relative preference information, in the form of ratios of utilities. However, such an information is of...

The increasing interest arising around the field of security becomes a pragmatic issue when we consider the behavior of the employees of large organizations involved in critical infrastructures. As a matter of common knowledge, the human factor is the weakest link in the security chain. This introduces the topic of the security awareness of employe...

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...

Localization for mobile platforms, in indoor scenarios, represents a cornerstone achievement to effective develop service and field robots able to safely cooperate. This paper proposes a methodology to achieve such a result by applying a completely decentralized and distributed algorithm. The key idea of the solution developed is to enable a dynami...

Seveso III Directive (2012/18/EU) requires operators to demonstrate that they have identified major accident hazards and scenarios, and that they have implemented adequate actions to prevent such accidents. Safety reports issued under the Seveso Directive specifically address accident scenarios caused by technical or human failures. Scenarios cause...

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...

Le tecnologie Smart stanno svolgendo un ruolo chiave nella quarta rivoluzione industriale. Sistemi IoT, Digital Twin, sensori attivi, Big Data su cloud e modellazione fisica spinta dal super calcolo scientifico possono essere integrati sinergicamente in un ambiente Safety 4.0. informazioni possa rendere integrato il concetto di sicurezza. Il monito...

Most of classical decision making processes aim at selecting the “best” alternative or at ranking alternatives based on the opinions of decision makers. Often, such a process occurs among people (experts or decision makers) who are expected to achieve some shared consensus in ranking the alternatives. However, this is not likely to happen (especial...

The reliability of the localization of Wireless Sensor Networks in presence of errors or malicious data alteration is a challenging research topic: recently, several studies have been carried out to identify, remove or neglect the faulted/malicious nodes. This paper addresses the capability of a network, composed of range-capable nodes and anchor n...

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...

Today clinicians may access large medical datasets, but very few systems have been designed to allow a practical and efficient exploration of data directly in critical medical environments such as operating rooms (OR). This work aims to assess during tests in laboratory and clinical settings a Surgery Touchless System (STS). This system allows clin...

Over the last decades epidural analgesia has gathered research interest and broad clinical acceptance. In this procedure, the detection of the epidural space is pivotal to avoid major complications. Although, some systems for supporting the anaesthetist in the epidural space detection are commercially available, this difficult procedure is often pe...

In this paper we consider a scenario where a set of agents, interconnected by a network topology, aim at computing an estimate of their own utility, importance or value, based on pairwise relative information having heterogeneous nature. In more detail, the agents are able to measure the difference between their value and the value of some their ne...

In this paper, we provide a maritime counter-piracy framework to represent the strategies put in place and the interaction between a set of actors (patrollers and attackers) in a wide maritime scenario. Specifically, we model the interaction between patrollers and attackers in terms of a Stackelberg leader–follower game. With respect to the previou...

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...

The design of an effective and efficient surveillance system is fundamental for the protection of the Critical Infrastructures. In a railway station, this requirement turns on as an urgent prerequisite: for its intrinsic nature, a station represents a complex environment to be monitored for both safety and security reasons. In this work, we show ho...

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,...

This book constitutes the post-conference proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security, CRITIS 2016, held in Paris, France, in October 2016. The 22 full papers and 8 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. They present the most recent innovations, trends,...

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a de-facto standard technique in centralized decision making. Consider a situation where there is a need to rank a set of elements or alternatives, based on their value or utility, of which we just know pairwise relative information, i.e., the ratio of their values. AHP proved an effective tool to retrieve th...

The detection of epidural space is usually performed by the technique of loss of resistance (LOR) without technological support, although there are few commercial options. We sought to design and develop a new noninvasive system able to detect the LOR without any changes to the conventional procedure. It allows detecting the LOR by a custom made al...

The costs associated with the healthcare system have risen dramatically in recent years. Healthcare decision-makers, especially in areas of hospital management, are rarely fortunate enough to have all necessary information made available to them at once. In this work we propose a stochastic model for the dynamics of the number of patients in a hosp...

During recent decades epidural analgesia has gained widespread recognition in many applications. In this complex procedure, anaesthetist uses a specific needle to inject anesthetic into the epidural space. It is crucial the appropriate insertion of the needle through inhomogeneous tissues placed between the skin and the epidural space to minimize a...

In this article, we present a pervasive solution for gait pattern classification that uses accelerometer data retrieved from a waist-mounted inertial sensor. The proposed algorithm has been conceived to operate continuously for long-term applications. With respect to traditional approaches that use a large number of features and sophisticated class...

In this chapter we study the access time on random walks, i.e., the expected time for a random walk starting at a node \(v_i\) to reach a node \(v_j\), an index that can be easily calculated resorting to the powerful tools of positive systems. In particular, we argue that such an index can be the base for developing novel topological descriptors, n...