Virginia Pilloni

Dr. Virginia Pilloni

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, Italy
+1
orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

16Years (2011-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

View All Publications
5 November 2015 in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
MNMichele Nitti
Michele Nitti
Virginia PilloniVirginia Pilloni
Virginia Pilloni
GCGiuseppe Colistra
Giuseppe Colistra
LALuigi Atzori
Luigi Atzori
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been evolving toward the creation of a cyber-physical world where everything can be found, activated, probed, interconnected, and updated, so that any possible interaction, both virtual and/or physical, can take place. A Crucial concept of this paradigm is that of the virtual object, which is the digital counterpart of any real (human or lifeless, static or mobile, solid or intangible) entity in the IoT. It has now become a major component of the current IoT platforms, supporting the discovery and mash up of services, fostering the creation of complex applications, improving the objects energy management efficiency, as well as addressing heterogeneity and scalability issues. This paper aims at providing the reader with a survey of the virtual object in the IoT world. Virtualness is addressed from several perspectives: historical evolution of its definitions, current functionalities assigned to the virtual object and how they tackle the main IoT challenges, and major IoT platforms, which implement these functionalities. Finally, we illustrate the lessons learned after having acquired a comprehensive view of the topic.

1 March 2018 in Future Internet
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
Virginia PilloniVirginia Pilloni
Virginia Pilloni
We are living in the era of the fourth industrial revolution, namely Industry 4.0. This paper presents the main aspects related to Industry 4.0, the technologies that will enable this revolution, and the main application domains that will be affected by it. The effects that the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), crowdsensing, crowdsourcing, cloud computing and big data will have on industrial processes will be discussed. The main objectives will be represented by improvements in: production efficiency, quality and cost-effectiveness; workplace health and safety, as well as quality of working conditions; products’ quality and availability, according to mass customisation requirements. The paper will further discuss the common denominator of these enhancements, i.e., data collection and analysis. As data and information will be crucial for Industry 4.0, crowdsensing and crowdsourcing will introduce new advantages and challenges, which will make most of the industrial processes easier with respect to traditional technologies.

30 January 2017 in Mobile Information Systems
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
MNMichele Nitti
Michele Nitti
Virginia PilloniVirginia Pilloni
Virginia Pilloni
DGDaniele Giusto
Daniele Giusto
Vlad PopescuVlad Popescu
Vlad Popescu
In the past few years, the Smart Cities concept has become one of the main driving forces for the urban transition towards a low carbon environment, sustainable economy, and mobility. Tourism, as one of the fastest growing industries, is also an important generator of carbon emissions; therefore, the recently emerging sustainable tourism concept is envisioned as an important part of the Smart Cities paradigm. Within this context, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) concept is the key technological point for the development of smart urban environments through the use of aggregated data, integrated in a single decisional platform. This paper performs the first analysis on the feasibility of the use of an IoT approach and proposes a specific architecture for a sustainable tourism application. The architecture is tailored for the optimisation of the movement of cruise ship tourists in the city of Cagliari (Italy), by taking into consideration factors such as transport information and queue waiting times. A first set of simulations is performed using 67-point of interest, real transportation data, and an optimisation algorithm.

19 March 2020 in Energies
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
MNMichele Nitti
Michele Nitti
FPFrancesca Pinna
Francesca Pinna
LPLucia Pintor
Lucia Pintor
Virginia PilloniVirginia Pilloni
Virginia Pilloni
Benedetto BarabinoBenedetto Barabino
Benedetto Barabino
Since the early stages of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), one of the application scenarios that have been affected the most by this new paradigm is mobility. Smart Cities have greatly benefited from the awareness of some people’s habits to develop efficient mobility services. In particular, knowing how people use public transportation services and move throughout urban infrastructure is crucial in several areas, among which the most prominent are tourism and transportation. Indeed, especially for Public Transportation Companies (PTCs), long- and short-term planning of the transit network requires having a thorough knowledge of the flows of passengers in and out vehicles. Thanks to the ubiquitous presence of Internet connections, this knowledge can be easily enabled by sensors deployed on board of public transport vehicles. In this paper, a Wi-Fi-based Automatic Bus pAssenger CoUnting System, named iABACUS, is presented. The objective of iABACUS is to observe and analyze urban mobility by tracking passengers throughout their journey on public transportation vehicles, without the need for them to take any action. Test results proves that iABACUS efficiently detects the number of devices with an active Wi-Fi interface, with an accuracy of 100% in the static case and almost 94% in the dynamic case. In the latter case, there is a random error that only appears when two bus stops are very close to each other.

1 September 2016 in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Virginia PilloniVirginia Pilloni
Virginia Pilloni
Alessandro FlorisAlessandro Floris
Alessandro Floris
AMAlessio Meloni
Alessio Meloni
Luigi AtzoriLuigi Atzori
Luigi Atzori
Smart home energy management (SHEM) systems can introduce adjustments in the working period and operations of home appliances to allow for energy cost savings, which can however affect the quality of experience (QoE) perceived by the user. This paper analyses this issue and proposes a QoE-aware SHEM system, which relies on the knowledge of the annoyance suffered by users when the operations of appliances are changed with respect to the ideal user's preferences. Accordingly, a number of profiles describing different usages are created in the design phase. At the deployment stage, users behavior and annoyance are registered to assign one of these profiles per appliance. The assigned profile is then exploited by the QoE-aware cost saving appliance scheduling and the QoE-aware renewable source power allocation algorithms. The former is aimed at scheduling controlled loads based on users profile preferences and electricity prices. The latter re-allocates appliances' operations whenever a surplus of energy is available by renewable energy sources. Experimental results demonstrate that the annoyance perceived by users is severely diminished with respect to a QoE-unaware strategy, at the expenses of only a limited reduction in energy saving.

1 November 2014 in Computer Networks
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
GCGiuseppe Colistra
Giuseppe Colistra
Virginia PilloniVirginia Pilloni
Virginia Pilloni
LALuigi Atzori
Luigi Atzori