An IoT-based monitoring approach for cultural heritage sites: The Matera case

Protection and preservation of cultural heritage is an important responsibility for policy makers, public and private institutions, and the citizens themselves. Technologists can make an important contribution by designing monitoring systems for these sites and using the data to prevent incidents. Internet-of-things technology offers, for a sustainable price and with significant flexibility, a wide range of different possibilities, fitting different circumstances: from monitoring the environmental parameters of a room in a museum to sensing structural changes in a historical building and to protecting vulnerable artifacts. In this paper, we consider the case of monitoring an extended cultural heritage area: a UNESCO protected site, the center of Matera, an Italian town that will be a European Capital of Culture in 2019. This city is a unique historical settlement, as buildings are partially carved into the rock that constitutes the geological substrate of the area, a local practice used since the prehistoric age. The extent and density of these structures makes the physical protection of the site a big challenge when the expected large crowds of tourists arrive. The objective of the proposed system is to anticipate the threats in a timely manner so that appropriate actions are taken by the authorities thus avoiding damage to the cultural heritage sites. We propose a technique for modeling the performances of the Internet-of-things–based monitoring systems that support the planning of incident management in a protected site by exploiting multiple, sparse, heterogeneous, and partially controlled sensors to monitor the behavior of the crowd. The technique is based on the use of Markovian agent models to study the parameters and the dynamics of a scenario, to understand the needs of the monitoring system.