Authoring tools and management information systems: study of a generalizable architecture

The need to effectively manage the documentation covering the entire production process, from the concept phase right through to market realise, constitutes a key issue in the creation of a successful and highly competitive product. For almost forty years the most commonly used strategies to achieve this have followed Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) guidelines. Translated into information management systems at the end of the '90s, this methodology is now widely used by companies operating all over the world in many different sectors. PLM systems and editor programs are the two principal types of software applications used by companies for their process aotomation. Editor programs allow to store in documents the information related to the production chain, while the PLM system stores and shares this information so that it can be used within the company and made it available to partners. Different software tools, which capture and store documents and information automatically in the PLM system, have been developed in recent years. One of them is the ''DirectPLM'' application, which has been developed by the Italian company ''Focus PLM''. It is designed to ensure interoperability between many editors and the Aras Innovator PLM system. In this dissertation we present ''DirectPLM2'', a new version of the previous software application DirectPLM. It has been designed and developed as prototype during the internship by Focus PLM. Its new implementation separates the abstract logic of business from the real commands implementation, previously strongly dependent on Aras Innovator. Thanks to its new design, Focus PLM can easily develop different versions of DirectPLM2, each one devised for a specific PLM system. In fact, the company can focus the development effort only on a specific set of software components which provides specialized functions interacting with that particular PLM system. This allows shorter Time-To-Market and gives the company a significant competitive advantage.

Modelling and simulating in systems biology: an approach based on multi-agent systems

Systems Biology is an innovative way of doing biology recently raised in bio-informatics contexts, characterised by the study of biological systems as complex systems with a strong focus on the system level and on the interaction dimension. In other words, the objective is to understand biological systems as a whole, putting on the foreground not only the study of the individual parts as standalone parts, but also of their interaction and of the global properties that emerge at the system level by means of the interaction among the parts. This thesis focuses on the adoption of multi-agent systems (MAS) as a suitable paradigm for Systems Biology, for developing models and simulation of complex biological systems. Multi-agent system have been recently introduced in informatics context as a suitabe paradigm for modelling and engineering complex systems. Roughly speaking, a MAS can be conceived as a set of autonomous and interacting entities, called agents, situated in some kind of nvironment, where they fruitfully interact and coordinate so as to obtain a coherent global system behaviour. The claim of this work is that the general properties of MAS make them an effective approach for modelling and building simulations of complex biological systems, following the methodological principles identified by Systems Biology. In particular, the thesis focuses on cell populations as biological systems. In order to support the claim, the thesis introduces and describes (i) a MAS-based model conceived for modelling the dynamics of systems of cells interacting inside cell environment called niches. (ii) a computational tool, developed for implementing the models and executing the simulations. The tool is meant to work as a kind of virtual laboratory, on top of which kinds of virtual experiments can be performed, characterised by the definition and execution of specific models implemented as MASs, so as to support the validation, falsification and improvement of the models through the observation and analysis of the simulations. A hematopoietic stem cell system is taken as reference case study for formulating a specific model and executing virtual experiments.