Stefano Forti is an assistant professor (RTDa) at the Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy. His position is partly funded with ESF REACT-EU resources. He is part of the Service-Oriented, Cloud and Fog Computing research group and of the Pervasive AI Lab.
His research focuses on the QoS-aware management of multiservice applications in Cloud-IoT ecosystems. His scientific interests include cloud-edge computing paradigms, secure software engineering, sustainable computing, and knowledge representation and reasoning.
He has taught several practical modules in advanced software engineering and is passionate about innovative methodologies for teaching computer science at all levels. Since 2015, he has been coordinating the Pisa CoderDojo club to teach young people how to code.
EDUCATION
- 2020 PhD in Computer Science. Thesis: Deployment and Management of Fog Applications, University of Pisa
- 2016 MSc in Computer Science and Networking. Thesis: QoS-Aware Deployment Through the Fog, University of Pisa and Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies
- 2014 BSc in Computer Science. Thesis: From Label Address to Geocode: Strategies for an Implementation (supervisors: Prof. Anna Bernasconi and Prof. Michela Bertolotto), University of Pisa
RESEARCH, TEACHING, or OTHER INTERESTS
Computer Science, Computer Networks and Communications, Software, Artificial Intelligence
A Constraint-Based Approach to Optimise QoS- and Energy-Aware Cloud-Edge Application Deployments Simone Gazza, Roberto Amadini, Antonio Brogi, Andrea D'iapico, Stefano Forti, Saverio Giallorenzo, Pierluigi Plebani, Francisco Ponce, Jacopo Soldani, Monica Vitali, Gianluigi Zavattaro ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 2026 Cloud-Edge application deployment involves placing multiple software components on infrastructural topologies of heterogeneous nodes, ranging from Cloud servers to Internet-of-Things (IoT) edge devices. When multiple versions (or “ flavours ”) of a component are available, application managers must select a flavour for each deployed component, and assign these components to specific nodes, all while considering constraints such as dependencies, quality of service (QoS), budget, operational costs, and carbon emissions. In complex scenarios, finding the optimal deployment is often infeasible for human operators without automated tools to systematically explore the solution space. To address this challenge, we introduce FREEDA, a first constraint optimisation approach for deploying constrained and multi-flavoured applications on Cloud-Edge infrastructure topologies. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of FREEDA through experiments on a variety of realistic Cloud-Edge infrastructural topologies and component architectures. Furthermore, we benchmark FREEDA against Zephyrus, a comparable tool employing the same underlying solving technology. Empirical results show that FREEDA achieves strong scalability across a broad spectrum of realistic configurations and consistently outperforms Zephyrus.
ECLYPSE: A Python Framework for Simulation and Emulation of the Cloud-Edge Continuum Jacopo Massa, Valerio De Caro, Stefano Forti, Patrizio Dazzi, Davide Bacciu, Antonio Brogi Journal of Software Evolution and Process, 2026 The Cloud‐Edge continuum enhances application performance by bringing computation closer to data sources. However, it presents considerable challenges in managing resources and determining application service placement, as these tasks require analyzing diverse, dynamic environments characterized by fluctuating network conditions. Addressing these challenges calls for tools combining simulation and emulation of Cloud‐Edge systems to rigorously assess novel application and resource management strategies. In this paper, we introduce ECLYPSE , a Python‐based framework that enables the simulation and emulation of the Cloud‐Edge continuum via adaptable resource allocation and service placement models. ECLYPSE features an event‐driven architecture for dynamically adapting network configurations and resources. It also supports seamless transitions between simulated and emulated setups, thus enabling the execution of experiments in simulated, emulated, and hybrid settings. In this work, we illustrate and assess ECLYPSE capabilities over three use cases, demonstrating the framework's effectiveness in rapid prototyping across diverse scenarios.
Carbon-Efficient Software Design and Development: A Systematic Literature Review Ornela Danushi, Stefano Forti, Jacopo Soldani ACM Computing Surveys, 2025 The ICT sector, responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions, is under scrutiny calling for methodologies and tools to design and develop software in an environmentally sustainable-by-design manner. However, the software engineering solutions for designing and developing carbon-efficient software are currently scattered over multiple different pieces of literature, which makes it difficult to consult the body of knowledge on the topic. In this article, we precisely conduct a systematic literature review on state-of-the-art proposals for designing and developing carbon-efficient software. We identify and analyse 65 primary studies by classifying them through a taxonomy aimed at answering the 5W1H questions of carbon-efficient software design and development. We first provide a reasoned overview and discussion of the existing guidelines, reference models, measurement solutions, and techniques for measuring, reducing, or minimising the carbon footprint of software. Ultimately, we identify open challenges and research gaps, offering insights for future work in this field.
Explaining Microservices' Cascading Failures From Their Logs Jacopo Soldani, Stefano Forti, Luca Roveroni, Antonio Brogi Software Practice and Experience, 2025 ContextIdentifying the possible root causes of observed failures is crucial in microservice applications, as much as explaining how such possible root failures propagated across the microservices forming an application. This can indeed help pick countermeasures avoiding observed failures to happen again, e.g., by introducing circuit breakers or bulkheads avoiding the root failures to propagate and cause those observed.ObjectiveThis paper aims at enabling to explain observed failures in microservice applications, either searching for all possible cascading failures or focusing only on those starting in a known root cause.MethodWe propose a log‐based root cause analysis technique, which declaratively determines the cascading failures that possibly caused an observed failure. We also enable exploiting our proposed technique in practice, by introducing a logging methodology to instrument applications to log their failures and service interactions, and by enabling to analyse such logs through yRCA, a prototype implementation of our proposed root cause analysis technique.ResultsThe practical usability of our proposed technique is assessed by means of a case study and controlled experiments. The case study shows the low effort for instrumenting a third‐party application to produce the logs needed by our technique and its effectiveness in explaining injected failures. The controlled experiments further assess our technique's effectiveness and performances in explaining failures obtained with an existing chaos testbed.ConclusionOur proposed technique can help to identify the cascading failures that possibly caused an observed failure in a microservice application. It can be used to determine all possible cascading failures, or to explain how cascading failures propagated from a known root cause (e.g., identified with some other existing root cause analyser).
Carbon-Aware Software Services Stefano Forti, Jacopo Soldani, Antonio Brogi Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 2025
Declarative application management with Kubernetes Stefano Forti, Alessandro Rontani, Carlo Aliprandi, Giovanni Frattini, Simone Gagliardi, Marco Volpini, Antonio Brogi Proceedings 2025 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering Ic2e 2025, 2025
Towards Sustainable Deployment of Microservices over the Cloud-IoT Continuum, with FREEDA Jacopo Soldani, Roberto Amadini, Antonio Brogi, Stefano Forti, Saverio Giallorenzo, Pierluigi Plebani, Monica Vitali, Gianluigi Zavattaro Frame 2024 Proceedings of the 2024 on Workshop on Flexible Resource and Application Management on the Edge Part of Hpdc 2024 3rd International Symposium on High Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing, 2024
Towards enabling observability of energy demand, with NEST Alessandro Bocci, Antonio Brogi, Gianpaolo Cugola, Stefano Forti, Luca Mottola, Virginia Pilloni, Sabrina Romano, Jacopo Soldani, Elio Usai Frame 2024 Proceedings of the 2024 on Workshop on Flexible Resource and Application Management on the Edge Part of Hpdc 2024 3rd International Symposium on High Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing, 2024
A Logic Programming Approach to VM Placement Remo Andreoli, Stefano Forti, Luigi Pannocchi, Tommaso Cucinotta, Antonio Brogi International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science Closer Proceedings, 2024
FREEDA: Failure-Resilient, Energy-aware, and Explainable Deployment of Microservice-based Applications over Cloud-IoT Infrastructures Ceur Workshop Proceedings, 2024
Pick a Flavour: Towards Sustainable Deployment of Cloud-Edge Applications Roberto Amadini, Simone Gazza, Jacopo Soldani, Monica Vitali, Antonio Brogi, Stefano Forti, Saverio Giallorenzo, Pierluigi Plebani, Francisco Ponce, Gianluigi Zavattaro Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 2024
Simulating FaaS Orchestrations In The Cloud-Edge Continuum Alessio Matricardi, Alessandro Bocci, Stefano Forti, Antonio Brogi Frame 2023 Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Flexible Resource and Application Management on the Edge, 2023
People Counting in the Times of Covid-19 E. Maione, S. Forti, A. Brogi Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 2023
Green Application Placement in the Cloud-IoT Continuum Stefano Forti, Antonio Brogi Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 2022
Failure Root Cause Analysis for Microservices, Explained Jacopo Soldani, Stefano Forti, Antonio Brogi Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 2022
Secure Partitioning of Composite Cloud Applications Alessandro Bocci, Roberto Guanciale, Stefano Forti, Gian-Luigi Ferrari, Antonio Brogi Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 2022
Foreword to the ICFC 2020 Proceedings Erol Gelenbe, Jie Liu, Valeria Cardellini, Song Guo, Vincenzo De Maio, et al. Proceedings 2020 IEEE International Conference on Fog Computing Icfc 2020, 2020
Measuring the Fog, Gently Antonio Brogi, Stefano Forti, Marco Gaglianese Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 2019
ECLYPSE: A Python Framework for Simulation and Emulation of the Cloud‐Edge Continuum J Massa, V De Caro, S Forti, P Dazzi, D Bacciu, A Brogi Journal of Software: Evolution and Process 38 (1), e70081 , 2026 2026 Citations: 3
A Constraint-Based Approach to Optimise QoS-and Energy-Aware Cloud-Edge Application Deployments S Gazza, R Amadini, A Brogi, A d'Iapico, S Forti, S Giallorenzo, P Plebani, ... ACM Transactions on Internet Technology , 2026 2026 Citations: 3
Failure-Resilient and Carbon-Efficient Deployment of Microservices over the Cloud-Edge Continuum F Ponce, S Gazza, A D'Iapico, R Amadini, A Brogi, S Forti, S Giallorenzo, ... arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.04123 , 2026 2026 Citations: 1
Declarative Traffic Engineering for Low-Latency and Reliable Networking J Massa, S Forti, F Paganelli, P Dazzi, A Brogi, A Clemm, T Eckert Future Generation Computer Systems 182 , 2026 2026
Engineering Carbon-aware Software Services M Angiolini, S Forti, J Soldani, A Brogi Research Square (Pre-print) , 2025 2025
Combining Declarative and Linear Programming for Application Management in the Cloud-Edge Continuum J Massa, S Forti, P Dazzi, A Brogi Future Generation Computer Systems , 2025 2025 Citations: 3
Pervasive Digital Services for People’s Well-Being, Inclusion and Sustainable Development: 24th IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society, I3E 2025 … A Achilleos, S Forti, GA Papadopoulos, I Pappas Springer Nature , 2025 2025
Declarative application management with Kubernetes S Forti, A Rontani, C Aliprandi, G Frattini, S Gagliardi, M Volpini, A Brogi 2025 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E), 267-271 , 2025 2025
Application Placement with Constraint Relaxation D Azzolini, M Duca, F Gallo, A Ielo, S Forti Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , 2025 2025
Declarative Deployment Planning for Green Pulverised Collective Computational Systems A Brogi, R Casadei, N Farabegoli, S Forti, M Viroli International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages, 114-132 , 2025 2025 Citations: 1
Explaining Microservices' Cascading Failures From Their Logs J Soldani, S Forti, L Roveroni, A Brogi Software: Practice and Experience 55 (5), 809-828 , 2025 2025 Citations: 11
Carbon-Efficient Software Design and Development: A Systematic Literature Review O Danushi, S Forti, J Soldani ACM Computing Surveys , 2025 2025 Citations: 22
Continuous reasoning for adaptive container image distribution in the cloud-edge continuum D Azzolini, S Forti, A Ielo Cluster Computing , 2025 2025 Citations: 5
Enhancing failure resilience of cloud-edge microservices: The FREEDA approach F Ponce, S Forti, J Soldani, A Brogi European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing, 105-111 , 2025 2025 Citations: 5
Carbon-aware software services S Forti, J Soldani, A Brogi European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing, 65-80 , 2025 2025 Citations: 8
Continuous QoS‐compliant orchestration in the Cloud‐Edge continuum G Bisicchia, S Forti, E Pimentel, A Brogi Software: Practice and Experience , 2024 2024 Citations: 12
Pick a flavour: Towards sustainable deployment of cloud-edge applications R Amadini, S Gazza, J Soldani, M Vitali, A Brogi, S Forti, S Giallorenzo, ... International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation … , 2024 2024 Citations: 6
Multi-layered continuous reasoning for cloud-iot application management JL Herrera, J Berrocal, S Forti, A Brogi, JM Murillo IEEE Transactions on Services Computing 17 (6), 3985-3998 , 2024 2024 Citations: 10
Towards declarative traffic engineering for guaranteed latency-based forwarding J Massa, S Forti, F Paganelli, P Dazzi, A Brogi, A Clemm, T Eckert European Conference on Parallel Processing, 231-242 , 2024 2024 Citations: 2
An Interview with Tsong Yueh Chen-2024 SIGSOFT Awardee S Forti ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes 49 (3), 21-22 , 2024 2024
MOST CITED SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS
QoS-aware Deployment of IoT Applications Through the Fog A Brogi, S Forti IEEE Internet of Things Journal 4 (5), 1185-1192 , 2017 2017 Citations: 615
How to Place Your Apps in the Fog: State of the Art and Open Challenges A Brogi, S Forti, C Guerrero, I Lera Software: Practice and Experience, 719-740 , 2020 2020 Citations: 215
How to best deploy your Fog applications, probably A Brogi, S Forti, A Ibrahim 1st International Conference on Fog and Edge Computing (ICFEC'17), Madrid … , 2017 2017 Citations: 180
Secure Cloud-Edge Deployments, with Trust S Forti, GL Ferrari, A Brogi Future Generation Computer Systems 102, 775-788 , 2020 2020 Citations: 93
Deploying Fog applications: How much does it cost, by the way? A Brogi, S Forti, A Ibrahim 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER … , 2018 2018 Citations: 62
Lightweight self-organising distributed monitoring of Fog infrastructures S Forti, M Gaglianese, A Brogi Future Generation Computer Systems 114, 605-618 , 2021 2021 Citations: 60
Predictive Analysis to Support Fog Application Deployment A Brogi, S Forti, A Ibrahim Fog and Edge Computing: Principles and Paradigms, Rajkumar Buyya and Satish … , 2019 2019 Citations: 48
Optimising QoS-assurance, Resource Usage and Cost of Fog Application Deployments A Brogi, S Forti, A Ibrahim Cloud Computing and Services Science Selected Papers, Communications in … , 2019 2019 Citations: 46
Simulating FogDirector Application Management S Forti, A Pagiaro, A Brogi Simulation Modelling Practice & Theory , 2020 2020 Citations: 41
Meet Genetic Algorithms in Monte Carlo: Optimised Placement of Multi-Service Applications in the Fog A Brogi, S Forti, C Guerrero, I Lera Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing (EDGE 2019) , 2019 2019 Citations: 38
Secure FaaS Orchestration in the Fog: How Far Are We? A Bocci, S Forti, GL Ferrari, A Brogi Computing , 2021 2021 Citations: 36
Bonsai in the Fog: an Active Learning Lab with Fog Computing A Brogi, S Forti, A Ibrahim, L Rinaldi 3rd IEEE International Conference on Fog and Mobile Edge Computing (FMEC … , 2018 2018 Citations: 36
Declarative Continuous Reasoning in the Cloud-IoT Continuum S Forti, G Bisicchia, A Brogi Journal of Logic and Computation , 2022 2022 Citations: 35
Probabilistic QoS-aware Placement of VNF chains at the Edge S Forti, F Paganelli, A Brogi Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , 2021 2021 Citations: 34
Mimicking FogDirector Application Management S Forti, A Ibrahim, A Brogi Software-Intensive Cyber-Physical Systems , 2019 2019 Citations: 34
Measuring the Fog, Gently A Brogi, S Forti, M Gaglianese 17th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, Toulouse … , 2019 2019 Citations: 24
Declarative provisioning of virtual network function chains in intent-based networks J Massa, S Forti, F Paganelli, P Dazzi, A Brogi 2023 IEEE 9th International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft … , 2023 2023 Citations: 23
Carbon-Efficient Software Design and Development: A Systematic Literature Review O Danushi, S Forti, J Soldani ACM Computing Surveys , 2025 2025 Citations: 22
Green application placement in the cloud-IoT continuum S Forti, A Brogi International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages, 208-217 , 2022 2022 Citations: 21
Continuous QoS-aware adaptation of Cloud-IoT application placements JL Herrera, J Berrocal, S Forti, A Brogi, JM Murillo Computing 105 (9), 2037-2059 , 2023 2023 Citations: 20
