Conservazione predittiva di edifici storici attraverso un sistema basato sull’IoT / Predictive preservation of historic buildings through IoT-based system

Cultural Heritage conservation is the set of interventions and actions to protect particularly valuable artistic, architectural and landscape assets, ensuring the accessibility of their values to present and future generations. The advent of new technologies introduced many possibilities and new strategies to monitor environments, including those with cultural value. This paper presents a system able to guarantee effective preventive conservation through active environmental control and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The strategy was applied to an important Roman villa, the villa of Domitian in Sabaudia (Italy), located within the Circeo National Park. It is a vast imperial villa, second in size only to Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli, yet minimally explored. The proposed application concerns the Cisterna delle Navi, which is located in the central area of the villa and characterized by the presence of nautical graffiti. The monitoring of the environmental parameters was implemented through a remote-control system, installing digital sensors inside the structure. Data are collected continuously through integrated supervision, monitoring, and shared management platform, based on web-cloud-IoT technology. The application of IoT systems in climate monitoring and control facilitated the prediction of humidity within the structures to be preserved so as to simulate and provide some alerts in case of emergency to prevent the detachment of the plaster, and therefore the possible graffiti loss.