Marco Autili

Domenico Amalfitano, Andreas Metzger, Marco Autili et al.

Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly transforming software engineering (SE) practices, influencing how SE processes are executed, as well as how software systems are developed, operated, and evolved. This paper applies design science research to build a roadmap for GenAI-augmented SE. The process consists of three cycles that incrementally integrate multiple sources of evidence, including collaborative discussions from the FSE 2025 "Software Engineering 2030" workshop, rapid literature reviews, and external feedback sessions involving peers. McLuhan's tetrads were used as a conceptual instrument to systematically capture the transforming effects of GenAI on SE processes and software products.The resulting roadmap identifies four fundamental forms of GenAI augmentation in SE and systematically characterizes their related research challenges and opportunities. These insights are then consolidated into a set of future research directions. By grounding the roadmap in a rigorous multi-cycle process and cross-validating it among independent author teams and peers, the study provides a transparent and reproducible foundation for analyzing how GenAI affects SE processes, methods and tools, and for framing future research within this rapidly evolving area. Based on these findings, the article finally makes ten predictions for SE in the year 2030.

Nele Reichert, Mashal Afzal Memon, Marco Autili et al.

Service robots operating in public environments frequently encounter interruptions when multiple users request service simultaneously. Resolving such conflicts requires ethical decision-making, as prioritizing one user request can disadvantage another. Current approaches rely on static rules or centralized arbitration and do not support autonomous, ethics-based conflict resolution. This paper addresses the question of how a single robot can arbitrate between multiple users during task interruptions and make ethically aligned decisions without relying on external coordination. We introduce a self-negotiation framework that represents each user by an ethical profile that captures their contextual ethical preferences and conditions, and resolves conflicts through an internal negotiation process. The framework is implemented in a modular ROS-based implementation and evaluated in simulation with a realistic interruption scenario. The results show that the system consistently produces user ethical preference-aligned outcomes, supports multilateral negotiation among users, and responds within 1.5 seconds, with near-linear runtime growth under increasing user input.

Marie Farrell, Matt Luckcuck, Angelo Ferrando et al.

Engineering reliable autonomous systems is an important and growing topic in computer science. As autonomous systems become more prevalent, easy-to-use techniques for building them reliably are increasingly important. This workshop report captures and expands on the discussions at the Lorentz Center Workshop "Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems" (ERAS), held from 10 to 14 June 2024. The workshop was co-organised by the organisers of the Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS) and the Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA). It brought together members of the FMAS and AREA communities, industry practitioners, and representatives from sectors where autonomous systems pose distinctive engineering challenges. The workshop focused on three main research topics: techniques for verification and validation of autonomous systems; engineering real-world autonomous systems; and software architectures for safe autonomous systems. Its main outcome is a catalogue of challenges in these areas and, most importantly, a pathway to solutions. Some challenges can already be tackled by techniques that are well known in academia but have not yet become regularly used in practice. Other challenges remain unresolved and require further research. This roadmap is intended to support future research and industrial collaboration.

Marco Autili, Amleto Di Salle, Alexander Perucci et al.

The Future Internet is becoming a reality, providing a large-scale computing environments where a virtually infinite number of available services can be composed so to fit users' needs. Modern service-oriented applications will be more and more often built by reusing and assembling distributed services. A key enabler for this vision is then the ability to automatically compose and dynamically coordinate software services. Service choreographies are an emergent Service Engineering (SE) approach to compose together and coordinate services in a distributed way. When mismatching third-party services are to be composed, obtaining the distributed coordination and adaptation logic required to suitably realize a choreography is a non-trivial and error prone task. Automatic support is then needed. In this direction, this paper leverages previous work on the automatic synthesis of choreography-based systems, and describes our preliminary steps towards exploiting Enterprise Integration Patterns to deal with a form of choreography adaptation.

Alessandro Aloisio, Marco Autili, Alfredo D'Angelo et al.

Due to the increasing complexity and heterogeneity of contemporary Command, Control, Communications, Computers, & Intelligence systems at all levels within military organizations, the adoption of the Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) principles and concepts is becoming essential. SOA provides flexibility and interoperability of services enabling the realization of efficient and modular information infrastructure for command and control systems. However, within a tactical domain, the presence of potentially highly mobile actors equipped with constrained communications media (i.e., unreliable radio networks with limited bandwidth) limits the applicability of traditional SOA technologies. The TACTICS project aims at the definition and experimental demonstration of a Tactical Services Infrastructure enabling tactical radio networks (without any modifications of the radio part of those networks) to participate in SOA infrastructures and provide, as well as consume, services to and from the strategic domain independently of the user's location.

Marco Autili, Vittorio Cortellessa, Paolo Di Benedetto et al.

Ubiquitous networking empowered by Beyond 3G networking makes it possible for mobile users to access networked software services across heterogeneous infrastructures by resource-constrained devices. Heterogeneity and device limitedness creates serious problems for the development and deployment of mobile services that are able to run properly on the execution context and are able to ensures that users experience the "best" Quality of Service possible according to their needs and specific contexts of use. To face these problems the concept of adaptable service is increasingly emerging in the software community. In this paper we describe how CHAMELEON, a declarative framework for tailoring adaptable services, is used within the IST PLASTIC project whose goal is the rapid and easy development/deployment of self-adapting services for B3G networks.

Marco Autili, Paola Inverardi, Massimo Tivoli et al.

Adaptation of software components is an important issue in Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE). Building a system from reusable or Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components introduces a set of problems, mainly related to compatibility and communication aspects. On one hand, components may have incompatible interaction behavior. This might require to restrict the system's behavior to a subset of safe behaviors. On the other hand, it might be necessary to enhance the current communication protocol. This might require to augment the system's behavior to introduce more sophisticated interactions among components. We address these problems by enhancing our architectural approach which allows for detection and recovery of incompatible interactions by synthesizing a suitable coordinator. Taking into account the specification of the system to be assembled and the specification of the protocol enhancements, our tool (called SYNTHESIS) automatically derives, in a compositional way, the glue code for the set of components. The synthesized glue code implements a software coordinator which avoids incompatible interactions and provides a protocol-enhanced version of the composed system. By using an assume-guarantee technique, we are able to check, in a compositional way, if the protocol enhancement is consistent with respect to the restrictions applied to assure the specified safe behaviors.

Marco Autili, Massimo Tivoli

Modern service-oriented systems are often built by reusing, and composing together, existing services distributed over the Internet. Service choreography is a possible form of service composition whose goal is to specify the interactions among participant services from a global perspective. In this paper, we formalize a method for the distributed and automated enforcement of service choreographies, and prove its correctness with respect to the realization of the specified choreography. The formalized method is implemented as part of a model-based tool chain released to support the development of choreography-based systems within the EU CHOReOS project. We illustrate our method at work on a distributed social proximity network scenario.

Marco Autili, Paola Inverardi, Massimo Tivoli

Adaptation of software components is an important issue in Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE). Building a system from reusable or Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components introduces a set of issues, mainly related to compatibility and communication aspects. Components may have incompatible interaction behavior. Moreover it might be necessary to enhance the current communication protocol to introduce more sophisticated interactions among components. We address these problems enhancing our architectural approach which allows for detection and recovery of integration mismatches by synthesizing a suitable coordinator. Starting from the specification of the system to be assembled and from the specification of the needed protocol enhancements, our framework automatically derives, in a compositional way, the glue code for the set of components. The synthesized glue code avoids interaction mismatches and provides a protocol-enhanced version of the composed system.