Abstract for: Check-Sim: Cultural Heritage Check-up Simulation model

In Italy there are almost 20,000 cultural towns, 40,000 castles and gardens, 3,000 museums, 10,000 churches, 200 archaeological sites.These cultural resources represent an essential factor for the Italian tourism industry and in general for the national economic system. Italy needs to distribute over the year its tourist offer. Except for the art cities like Rome, Florence or Venice, the Italian tourism today is mainly concentrated on the so called “beach tourism”. Therefore it is more and more necessary to promote cultural heritage as an essential source to attract tourists throughout the whole year rather than to focus only for the seaside beauty. The paper aims to describe a research work, in progress, where the objective is to study the risk analysis and the decay process of the “movable” (transportable) artwork due to different reasons: aging & preservation location; natural & criminal events; inappropriate restoration and finally transportation & exhibition time. The presence of many endogenous and exogenous variables which interact each other through different feedback loops creates non-linearity. Different risk elements (pollution, vandalism, natural events, …) are taken into account and a cost-benefit analysis is also elaborated. A first version of a microworld System Dynamics simulation model has been developed.