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ABSTRACTThis paper reports a detailed study on some relevant portions of the main façades of Caserta Royal Palace (Reggia di Caserta), one of the most important Italian monuments, comparable for its impressive architecture to the Royal Palace of Versailles in France and considered the largest royal palace in the world by volume. The research was focused on the weathering pathologies affecting the stone surfaces that, in the last decades, suffered several detachments of fragments from the coatings and from other architectural elements such as string courses, eaves, and capitals. A preliminary characterization of the materials of the façades and an evaluation of the relative weathering pathologies provided the information required for appropriate restoration and securing of these portions of the building. In particular, an innovative evaluation procedure which draws on techniques typical of the earth sciences allowed the proposal of a ‘risk attitude’ applied to discrete portions of the geomaterials used in the built heritage which is based on the influence of different factors leading to weakening of the stone and to the final detachment of rock fragments. Such a large and complete set of information should be carefully considered by the project planners to adopt the required steps for a suitable risk mitigation and for securing the site during restoration.

With the wide adoption of cloud computing across technology industries and research institutions, an ever-growing interest in cloud orchestration frameworks has emerged over the past few years. These orchestration frameworks enable the automated provisioning and decommissioning of cloud applications in a timely and efficient manner, but they offer limited or no support for application management. While management functionalities, such as configuring, monitoring and scaling single components, can be directly covered by cloud providers and configuration management tools, holistic management features, such as backing up, testing and updating multiple components, cannot be automated using these approaches. In this paper, we propose a concept to automatically generate executable holistic management workflows based on the TOSCA standard. The practical feasibility of the approach is validated through a prototype implementation and a case study.