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. Currently. She is IEEE Fellow and Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association. 

Her research interests include management and modeling of transportation, logistics and manufacturing systems; discrete event systems; Petri nets; optimization; consensus protocols; fault detection. Prof. Fanti has published more than 330 papers and two textbooks on her research topics. Prof. Fanti was/is scientific responsible of the Polytechnic of Bari of the following European projects: COGISTICS  (PF7), NEMO, optiTruck, AEOLIX, ELVITEN, eCharge4Drivers (Horizon 2020), CEF-FENIX and of the incoming Horizon Europe project IN2CCAM.