Using IoT for Accessible Tourism in Smart Cities

Abstract

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter Abstract In the past few years, the Smart City concept became one of the main driving forces for the transition towards sustainable economy and improved mobility. Tourism, as one of the fastest growing economies worldwide, is an integrated part of the Smart City paradigm. Taking into consideration recent studies performed by the United Nations, stating that almost one third of the population is directly affected by disability, the concept of Acces- sible Tourism needs also to be integrated in the future vision for tourism, especially in the context of Smart Cities, environments fully benefiting from the recent technological advances. Within the combined framework of Smart Cities and Accessible Tourism, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) concept is the key technological point for the development of smart urban environments. IoT and big data are both technology-driven developments, leading to scenarios such as the Smart Cities one that has the potential to make citizen live smarter, more sustainable and more accessible. This chapter analyses the key requirements for IoT applications in a Smart City context, the state-of-the-art for the use of IoT for Accessible Tourism applications and proposes an architecture together with its practical implementation, tailored for the use-case of accessible tourism for physically impaired persons. state-of-the-art for the use of IoT for Accessible Tourism and presents an IoT architecture for the specific Smart City scenario dedicated to the sustainable management of the tourist flow in the urban environment of Cagliari. Based on the presented IoT architecture, a Tour Planner Application with features for accessible tourism is presented, together with the mathematical optimization model used for generating a specific tour including a subset of PoIs. The proposed application is tailored for persons with physical impairments. The results of the initial tests are presented and first conclusions are drawn. The obtained results showed that the proposed algorithm can be customized to return a subset of PoIs for disabled tourists as opposed to the set of routes determined for able-bodied tourists. The future work will be focused on refining the used algorithm by taking into considerations new accessibility constraints and also other types of input, such as for example live accessibility data from public transportation.