Data-Driven Tourism for Sustainability

Core objective of the project: Intelligent use of data for the sustainable (further) development of tourism regions. Description: The current developments around COVID-19, but also regarding other influencing variables, e.g., in the area of climate change, have shown how sensitively the tourism ecosystem reacts to disruptive influences and events. It is therefore essential for future development to achieve the highest possible level of resilience through a combination of sustainable concepts as well as digitalization and the use of technology. The project focuses on the analysis of tourist flows within cities and regions. Using artificial intelligence and agent-based simulations, the authentic movement and behavior patterns of the target groups are to be learned and understood to then incorporate these findings in the sense of a sustainable and gentle mobility concept. This also enables the modelling of "what-if" scenarios in the sense of decision support for the respective administrations. An integral part of the platform system to be developed will be a federated approach that offers a high degree of flexibility for new data sources and participation and at the same time also preserves the data sovereignty of the respective data owners as well as data protection (keyword: data sovereignty, privacy-by-design). Equally important is the accompanying and steering development of destination management concepts as well as concepts for the scaling of project results for a strategic, sustainable development of regions. A particular focus here is on avoiding the disadvantaging of weak or disadvantaged groups using technology (keyword: digital ethics).