Pietro Turco

Pietro Turco is a PhD student in Intelligent Systems Engineering at the University of Verona. His research addresses a practical problem in industrial automation: how to test manufacturing software thoroughly before it is connected to expensive and safety-critical physical machinery. He investigates digital twins as executable environments in which control and supervisory software can interact with realistic models of machines, sensors, communication infrastructure and production processes.

A central part of his work is the deterministic orchestration of heterogeneous simulation models. He studies Lingua Franca as a coordination language and the Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) as a standard for bringing models produced by different engineering tools into the same co-simulation. His FMI Proxy work synchronises external Functional Mock-up Units with Lingua Franca’s logical-time model, allowing models with different internal solvers to participate in a reproducible simulation.

Pietro is one of the developers of Frost, an open-source platform for early validation and testing of manufacturing software. Frost models not only machine behaviour but also the APIs and communication patterns of a production plant, decoupling the software under test from the underlying simulation model. The platform has been exercised on a digital twin of the ICE Laboratory, where accelerated simulation is used to explore production recipes and support rapid virtual commissioning.