Maria Pia Fanti received the Laurea degree in electronic engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 1983. She was a visiting researcher at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, New York, in 1999. Since 1983, she has been with the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering of the Polytechnic of Bari, Italy, where she is currently a Full Professor of system and control engineering and Chair of the Laboratory of Automation and Control.
She is an IEEE Fellow, class of 2017, of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for her contributions to the modeling and control of discrete event systems.
She is a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association.
She is senior editor of the IEEE Trans. on Automation Science and of the IEEE Transaction on Intelligent Vehicles Engineering, and Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems. She is member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, and was member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automaton Society, founder and chair of the Technical Committee on Automation in Logistics of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
Maria Pia Fanti was general chair, program chair and member of the organizing committee of about 100 international conferences, in particular she was General Chair of the 2011 IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering in Trieste (Italy), of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Service Operations and Logistics, and Informatics and the 2019 IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Conference, both of them in Bari.
Her research interests include management and modeling of complex systems, such as intelligent transportation, logistics and manufacturing systems; discrete event systems; Petri nets; fault detection and cybersecurity. Prof. Fanti has published more than 400 papers including over 140 articles in international journals, over 14 chapters in international books, and two textbooks on her research topics. As reported on her profile on the scientific database Google Scholar, she has received over 8,700 citations from researchers worldwide, with an h-index of 50 and an i-index of 162.
She has held the following positions at the Polytechnic University of Bari: Rector's Delegate for the development strategies of the international relations, president of the disciplinary board, delegate for internationalization of the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, coordinator of the degree program in Automation Engineering, coordinator of the master's degree program in Digital Transformation.
She has been scientific responsible for the Polytechnic of Bari of 12 Projects of the European horizon programs and of 6 national projects, and she was the coordinator of the Horizon Europe project IN2CCAM by managing 21 partners of 11 European Countries.
She is a founding member and CEO of the Polytechnic University of Bari and University of Trieste spinoff AutoLogS that provided goods and services in different fields of automation and logistics at national level.