Italy is the country with the world's most extensive cultural, artistic and architectural heritage, including the largest number of locations on the UNESCO World Heritage List with 58 recognised as “World Heritage” sites. Protecting and enhancing such a vast heritage is a huge challenge. On the one hand, cultural assets require adequate enhancement to provide people with easy access; on the other, this immense heritage needs to be monitored and protected from vandalism or degradation, as well as from the effects of climate change, pollution and hydro-geological instability over time.
This means that continuous monitoring of the structural condition of historic and high-value assets, as well as of the surrounding environment, is essential to prevent damage from events that compromise their integrity.
With a heritage so vast and so exposed to a variety of risks, the approach to be taken must necessarily be based on an enhanced use of the available data. It must also be multi-technological, multi-scale and multi-sensor in order to collect information from different sources that can be correlated to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomena taking place. This enables any sign of potential anomalies to be identified in advance in order to best prevent any possible future criticalities.
For all these reasons, and in line with the vision expressed in the Be Tomorrow – Leonardo 2030 Strategic Plan, Leonardo is offering the X-2030 advanced global monitoring platform. This is a so-called C5I solution, i.e. one for “command, control, communication, computer, cyber and intelligence”, and is able to correlate large quantities of data from heterogeneous sources in real time to enable the situational awareness necessary for control on the ground.
The platform was created for the purposes of civil protection, for example in the context of sporting events, demonstrations or natural disasters that call for rapidity of action and decision-making, and for supporting the police in public order management operations. With its ability to contribute to long-term planning and the management of emergencies, X-2030 can also be of great help in enhancing and protecting the artistic and cultural heritage.
X-2030 exploits advanced technologies - AI, cloud, supercomputing, deep learning algorithms and video analytics - to provide a photograph of the situation in real time and to support decision making by operators.
Of particular interest, in the case of cultural assets, is the possibility to integrate information from Earth observation satellites with data supplied by databases of geological, landscape, natural and archaeological interest, as well as with data acquired from radar systems, sensors and drones.
The capacity of X-2030 for integration, correlation and analysis means that data from satellites, databases and field sensors - together with images acquired by drones – makes possible the accurate digital reconstruction of a site of interest (digital twin) in order to identify any phenomena taking place and to predict their evolution over time while highlighting potential criticalities.
X-2030 also enables the running of hydraulic hazard analyses to calculate, for example, the hydro-geological risk to which a site is subjected, in order to share reports and generate consequent alerts for the prevention of degradation phenomena.
