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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND NETWORK SERVICES: A NEW CENTRE OF THE TECIP INSTITUTE, “ICT FOR COMPLEX INDUSTRIAL SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES” (ICT-COISP), IS NOW ACTIVE

Publication date: 04.04.2016
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The Tecip Institute of Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies enriches its organisational and functional structure with a newly created Research Centre: “Information and Communication Technologies for Complex Industrial Systems and Processes (ICT-COISP)”.

The Centre, which has been created in order to meet the request to develop various research topics belonging to different areas, can count upon the broad experience of the researchers of the Institute in the areas of artificial intelligence and network services and architectures, making this know-how available to industry in order to solve practical problems.

It represents a shared, unique environment, in which it is possible to develop applied research to the efficient analysis of data, provided by industrial backgrounds.

Applications are extremely varied: starting from the identification, prediction and prevention of inefficiencies, anomalies, damage and qualitative deviations (for example, in order to improve control systems or to plan timely precautionary maintenance interventions); from which it is then possible to identify the causes of anomalous events, which is an essential premise for the improvement of existing systems and the design of advanced systems. Moreover, these technologies apply to machine design and control, to the management and optimisation of entire production processes (in terms of product quality, production costs, energy consumption, efficient resource management, environmental impact), to the development of models to predict machine performance or product transformations within the intermediate production stages, up to scenario studies to evaluate the feasibility of more radical process transformation interventions. The potential of these technologies is enormous for the extraction, formalisation and treasuring of company know-how, which is the most relevant resource in terms of maintaining and increasing competitiveness in the global market.

This Centre joins together two complementary and strong skills of the TeCIP Institute: on one side, the experience developed by the research group of Engr. Valentina Colla, Responsible of the Centre, on artificial intelligence techniques oriented towards dealing with industrial problems, such as modelling and simulation, system monitoring and control, complex processes and machines, development of systems and methodologies to analyse great quantities of data, development of methodologies and advanced design of machines and processes; and, on the other side, the expertise of the research group coordinated by Prof. Piero Castoldi on the information and communication technologies for the support of distributed industrial applications, such as data centres, big data, clouds, HPC related to the management of data from industrial backgrounds.

The first challenge for the new Centre is a research project aimed at creating an important computational centre, equipped for the elaboration of great amounts of data in order to optimise the design and realisation process of complex machines with the integrated contribution of various stakeholders with multi-disciplinary skills. Other activities in progress are 14 European Union financed projects, 3 of which are coordinated by Engr. Valentina Colla, and 10 industrial projects.

The ICT-COISP research activity aims on the whole to develop software and hardware tools supporting the industrial competitiveness and sustainability.