I am a researcher in the Department of Engineering for Innovation at the University of Salento (Lecce, Italy). I have obtained the National Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor in the Italian higher education system, in the 2023/2025 call (Ministerial Decree n. 1796/2023), for the disciplinary field 01/A6 – Operations Research (Academic Recruitment Field 01/A – Mathematics, according to the national classification).

The main topic of my degree thesis was the fast computation of point-to-point quickest paths on very large static and time-dependent road networks.
The aim of my activities was to investigate on the benefits of a new heuristic for the quickest path problem, presented in G. Ghiani, E. Guerriero (2014), “A lower bound for the quickest path problem”, Networks.
First, we embedded this new heuristic in an unidirectional version of the A* algorithm, then we have done various experiments to establish gains in terms of time and node discovered. I’ve worked both in a database context (using postgis and pgRouting) and also with a Java implementation (graphhopper) to exploit better performance due to multithreading parallelization of preprocessing activities.

My tutors during my PhD were Prof. Gianpaolo Ghiani, Prof. Emanuela Guerriero and Prof. Emanuele Manni. In my PhD activities I’ve been interested in a number of topics strongly related to information technology; the main one is the automated algorithm design (learn-and-construct algorithms, automated meta-heuristic design, …).

 

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9505-5869