Human Behaviour Centered Design: Developing a Software System for Cultural Heritage

This paper introduces an integrated framework for sustainability and urban security socio-technical systems. The focus is to design and develop a hardware/software system based on human expected and real behaviour. The paper explains the steps taken through developing the Uffizi Museum crowd monitoring and queue management system. The goal of implementing such system was to remove queues outside the Museum which is in line with urban security and visitors comfort. We took advantage of a data-driven approach mapped on sustainability framework. Such approach which was fed with both real-time sensory data and prediction models, successfully eliminated long queues to access the museum. We took into consideration performance of software system as well to reduce the response time to a threshold that is compliant with real-time requirements. We started our experiments from fall 2016 and operationalized it in October, 2018. During this experimentation period, we learned a lot of lessons that we report in this paper.