About the Authors

Annamaria Ficara

Contributed equally to this work with: Annamaria Ficara, Lucia Cavallaro, Francesco Curreri

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft

Affiliations DMI Department, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy, MIFT Department, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

Lucia Cavallaro

Contributed equally to this work with: Annamaria Ficara, Lucia Cavallaro, Francesco Curreri

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Project administration, Software, Visualization, Writing – original draft

Affiliation School of Computing and Engineering, University of Derby, Derby, United Kingdom

Francesco Curreri

Contributed equally to this work with: Annamaria Ficara, Lucia Cavallaro, Francesco Curreri

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft

Affiliations DMI Department, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy, MIFT Department, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

Giacomo Fiumara

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Validation

‡ GF, PDM, OB, WS and AL also contributed equally to this work.

Affiliation MIFT Department, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

Pasquale De Meo

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

‡ GF, PDM, OB, WS and AL also contributed equally to this work.

Affiliation DICAM Department, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

Ovidiu Bagdasar

Roles Formal analysis, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

‡ GF, PDM, OB, WS and AL also contributed equally to this work.

Affiliation School of Computing and Engineering, University of Derby, Derby, United Kingdom

Wei Song

Roles Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

‡ GF, PDM, OB, WS and AL also contributed equally to this work.

Affiliation College of Information Technology, Shanghai Ocean University, Shanghai, China

Antonio Liotta

Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Antonio.Liotta@unibz.it

‡ GF, PDM, OB, WS and AL also contributed equally to this work.

Affiliation Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.