Pervasive Software Lab

The Pervasive Software Lab is at the forefront of research in pervasive and distributed computing, dedicated to shaping the future of intelligent, adaptive, and scalable systems. Our team of PhD students and research fellows works on pioneering technologies such as aggregate programming, digital twins, and their applications across various domains, including smart cities, IoT, and autonomous systems. We are committed to pushing the boundaries of software design and engineering, creating innovative solutions that seamlessly blend into everyday environments and empower smarter decision-making. Explore our research, projects, and collaborations to discover how we are driving technological transformation.

Discover our research

Research

Aggregate Computing

Aggregate computing is a paradigm for distributed systems enabling developers to define high-level collective behaviors emerging from local interactions. Our group is among the founders of the paradigm focusing on languages and tools that abstract the complexity of low-level communication and coordination in large scale systems.

Distributed Intelligence

Distributed Intelligence studies how intelligent behavior emerges from networks of learning and decision-making entities. Our group investigates self-organising and swarm-based AI, federated learning for collaborative training, and distributed reinforcement learning for coordinated adaptation.

Digital Twins

Committed to bridging the physical and digital worlds, we are developing Digital Twins that mirror real-world entities and processes. Our focus is in researching architectures and platforms to support the development of Digital Twins and their application to digitalize complex and dynamic ecosystems involving multiple heterogeneous assets and technologies.

Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-Agent Systems approach the development of distributed systems involving multiple autonomous entities that reason, learn, and interact with each other. Our group research methodologies and tools to support the design, implementation, and deployment of Multi-Agent Systems, to develop autonomous and adaptive systems.

NeuroSymbolic AI

NeuroSymbolic AI is an emerging field that combines neural networks and symbolic reasoning to develop AI systems that can learn from data and reason over it. Our group is contributing by focusing the development of explainable and interpretable AI systems.

Complex Systems

Complex Systems are systems composed of many interacting entities that exhibit emergent properties. Our group is researching methodologies and tools to model, simulate, and analyze complex systems, to understand their behavior and predict their evolution.

Our Team

Andrea Omicini

Andrea Omicini

Full professor

Full Professor at the Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna. As a researcher, I am working on multi-agent systems, intelligent systems engineering, computational logic, explainable AI, agreement technologies, self-organising systems, simulation, and pervasive systems. As a professor, I am teaching distributed systems, multi-agent systems, and intelligent systems engineering.

Mirko Viroli

Mirko Viroli

Full professor

One of the main architects of the Aggregate Computing paradigm, his main focus is around programming models/languages, software engineering, and connection with distributed artificial intelligence

Alessandro Ricci

Alessandro Ricci

Associate Professor

Alessandro specializes in software engineering for Multi-Agent Systems and Digital Twins. He introduced the coordination artifact abstraction and developed CArtAgO for designing, implementing and running artifact-based environments. He proposed the idea of Digital Twins Ecosystems through the Web of Digital Twins.

Danilo Pianini

Danilo Pianini

Associate professor

Danilo Pianini specializes in aggregate programming, simulation, and DevOps techniques. Advocates open science. Chief architect of the Alchemist Simulator and the Protelis Programming language. Creator of Collektive.

Sara Montagna

Sara Montagna

Associate Professor

Sara is conducting research on digital transformation in healthcare. Her research interests are in the area of Medical Informatics, covering different areas, from AI-application to Internet of Medical Things and Digital Twins.

Andrea Roli

Andrea Roli

Researcher and Adjunct professor

Andrea is a researcher in complex systems and artificial intelligence, with a focus on biologically inspired models, biorobotics, and collective intelligence. His work spans both theoretical and applied aspects of embodied AI, leveraging information-theoretic methods to investigate the dynamics of complex systems.

Roberto Casadei

Roberto Casadei

Senior assistant professor

He is an expert in collective intelligence in large-scale multi-agent systems. Together with Viroli, he is the main contributor to ScaFi and he is the main architect of aggregate process. He is the principal investigator of the FoMaSe project.

Giovanni Ciatto

Giovanni Ciatto

Junior assistant professor

Giovanni Ciatto is a software engineer, data scientist, and assistant professor. His research interests range from Software Engineering to Data Science and include Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Systems. He’s currently focusing on the integration of symbolic and sub-symbolic AI. He’s currently developing and maintaining the 2P-Kt technology.

Gianluca Aguzzi

Gianluca Aguzzi

Postdoctoral Researcher

Gianluca Aguzzi’s research interests focus on multi-agent learning in cooperative scenarios, aggregate computing, and the application of language models in software engineering. He is a key contributor to ScaFi and one of the primary developers of MacroSwarm.

Paolo Baldini

Paolo Baldini

Postdoctoral Researcher

Paolo Baldini is employed at the University of Bologna, where he conducts research in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; his primary goal is to enable robots to autonomously face unpredictable situations that might occur during operation. Other areas of interest include Complex Systems, Unconventional Computing, Large Language Models, and Genes Regulatory Networks.

Samuele Burattini

Samuele Burattini

Postdoctoral Researcher

Samuele’s research interests are on software engineering aspects of Digital Twins, Agent-Oriented Programming, and the Web of Things. He is currently employed on a project for the municipality of Bologna working on Urban Digital Twins. His PhD thesis focused on Digital Twin Ecosystems applied to the healthcare domain in a collaboration with AUSL Romagna.

Davide Domini

Davide Domini

PhD Candidate

Davide is a PhD candidate from University of Bologna since November 2023, supervised by Prof. Mirko Viroli. His research interests are related to Collective Intelligence, Federated Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Aggregate Computing, Software Development and Self-Organizing Systems.

Martina Baiardi

Martina Baiardi

PhD Candidate

She is the major maintainer of JaKtA, an open-source tool for programming BDI Multi-Agent Systems. Her research interests are related to Software Development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, Virtualization, Container Orchestration, Multi-Agent Systems, Collective Systems, and Autonomic Systems.

Nicolas Farabegoli

Nicolas Farabegoli

PhD Candidate

Nicolas Farabegoli is a PhD candidate at the University of Bologna since 2023. His research focuses on Cloud-Edge and IoT systems, deployment models and strategies for collective systems, aggregate programming, software engineering, and DevOps methodologies. He actively contributes to various research projects and open-source tools related to his research lines like Collektive, PulvReAKt, and ScaFi.

Angela Cortecchia

Angela Cortecchia

PhD Student

Angela Cortecchia is a PhD student at the University of Bologna since November 2024, under the supervision of Prof. Danilo Pianini. Her research focuses on Software Development, with an emphasis on Aggregate Computing, Collective Systems, Multi-Agent Systems, and Autonomic Systems, particularly through the development of Collektive, an open-source tool for Aggregate Computing.

Mattia Matteini

Mattia Matteini

PhD Student

Mattia is a PhD student at the University of Bologna since November 2025, supervised by Prof. Andrea Omicini and Prof. Giovanni Ciatto. His research mainly focuses on Intelligent Systems, with particular interest in Agentic AI, Neuro-Symbolic AI, and Cognitive Architectures.

Former Members

Matteo Magnini

Matteo Magnini

Postdoctoral Researcher

Currently Matteo is a postdoc researcher at the University of Luxembourg. He did his PhD at the University of Bologna, under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Omicini. His research activities comprehends the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Neuro-Symbolic AI, Large Language Models, Logics, Fair AI and Multi-Agent Systems.

Michele Braccini

Michele Braccini

Postdoctoral Researcher

Michele Braccini was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna. His research focuses mainly on computational models inspired by gene regulatory networks for biological processes—in particular cell differentiation—and on bio-inspired adaptation mechanisms for controlling (swarms of) robots. Recently, he has been exploring the intersection between AI and creativity.

Ruslan Shaiakhmetov

Ruslan Shaiakhmetov

Postdoctoral Researcher

Ruslan Shaiakhmetov specializes in robotics, simulation, and machine learning. Creator of Yasik.

Andrea Giulianelli

Andrea Giulianelli

Research Fellow

Andrea was a Research Fellow at the University of Bologna from April 2024 to May 2025. He is a key contributor and main maintainer of HWoDT, a framework to build ecosystems of heterogeneous Digital Twins. His research activities focused on Digital Twin Ecosystems, Web of Things, and Internet of Things.

Angelo Filaseta

Angelo Filaseta

Research Fellow

Angelo was involved in projects within the industrial sector, primarily centered on implementing remote software updates for industrial machinery. His additional research interests included simulations.

Our Projects

Project Emerge

Project Emerge

An affordable, modular, and open-source swarm robotics platform for education and research.
Wood 4.0

Wood 4.0

Industrial project aiming to develop a versatile, high-performance, and digitized platform to manage large scale woodworking manufacturing machines.
Twinkle

Twinkle

Aims to develop a new open and distributed DT platform, Digital Twin Continuum (DTC), to support the management, deployment and exploitation of Digital Twin Ecosystems.
FoMaSe

FoMaSe

Aims to investigate ways for addressing the micro-macro link and artificial collective intelligence by a computer science and software engineering perspective

Our Software Systems

2P-Kt

2P-Kt

A Kotlin Multi-Platform ecosystem for symbolic AI (and a Prolog interpreter)
Alchemist

Alchemist

Alchemist is a simulator for pervasive, aggregate, and nature-inspired computing.
Collektive

Collektive

Collektive is a Kotlin Multiplatform DSL for Aggregate Computing.
JaKtA

JaKtA

JaKtA is a Kotlin based framework for BDI agent programming
Protelis

Protelis

Protelis is a stand-alone JVM-based language for aggregate computing.
ScaFi

ScaFi

ScaFi (Scala Fields) is a Scala-based library and framework for Aggregate Programming.
HWoDT

HWoDT

Implementing the Web of Digital Twins with Hypermedia
WLDT

WLDT

An open-source Java library for implementing Digital Twins

Partnership with UniMoRe

Latest News

IEEE ACSOS 2026 at the Cesena Campus

We are proud to announce that the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2026) took place September 7–11, 2026, at the University of Bologna’s Cesena Campus — marking a historic milestone as the first international conference ever organised at this campus.

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