Abstract
“Smartness” and “sustainability” are gaining growing attention from both practitioners and policy makers. “Smartness” and “sustainability” assessments are of crucial importance for directing, in a systemic perspective, the decision-making process toward sustainability and smart growth objectives. Sustainability assessment is a major challenge due to the multidisciplinary aspects involved that make the evaluation process complex and hinder the effectiveness of available monitoring tools. To achieve the assessment objective, we introduce an enhanced fuzzy logic-based framework for handling the inherent uncertainty and vagueness of the involved variables: we apply our approach to Italy, and we compare it with two other sustainability methodologies. We also perform a correlation analysis to assess the relationship between our ranking results and the attained quality of life scores. Our approach ensures a high level of versatility that makes its use possible jointly with (or alternatively to) other existing methodologies such as the Global Sustainable Tourism Council Criteria and the United Nations World Tourism Organization destination-level indicators.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abu Arqub O (2017) Adaptation of reproducing kernel algorithm for solving fuzzy Fredholm–Volterra integrodifferential equations. Neural Comput Appl 28(7):1591–1610
Abu Arqub O, Abo-Hammour Z (2014) Numerical solution of systems of second-order boundary value problems using continuous genetic algorithm. Inf Sci 279:396–415
Abu Arqub O, AL-Smadi M, Momani S, Hayat T (2016) Numerical solutions of fuzzy differential equations using reproducing kernel hilbert space method. Soft Comput 20(8):3283–3302
Abu Arqub O, Al-Smadi M, Momani S, Hayat T (2017) Application of reproducing kernel algorithm for solving second-order, two-point fuzzy boundary value problems. Soft Comput 21(23):7191–7206
Agyeiwaah E, McKercher B, Suntikul W (2017) Identifying core indicators of sustainable tourism: a path forward? Tour Manag Perspect 24:26–33
Andria J, di Tollo G (2015) Clustering local tourism systems by threshold acceptance. In: Applications of evolutionary computation—18th European conference, EvoApplications 2015, Proceedings, pp 629–640
Andria J, di Tollo G, Pesenti R (2015) Detection of local tourism systems by threshold accepting. Comput Manag Sci 12:559–575
Andria J, di Tollo G, Pesenti R (2019) A fuzzy evaluation of tourism sustainability. In: Moscato P, de Vries NJ (eds) Business and consumer analytics: new directions. Springer, Cham
Bien A (2008) A simple user’s guide to certification for sustainable tourism and ecotourism. Center for Ecotourism and Sustainable Development
Buckley R (2012) Sustainable tourism: research and reality. Ann Tour Res 39(2):528–546
Butler R (1980) The concept of a tourist area cycle of evolution: implications for management of resources. Can Geogr/Le Géographe canadien 24(1):5–12
Butler RW (1999) Sustainable tourism: a state-of-the-art review. Tour Geogr 1(1):7–25
Chen S, Ma B, Zhang K (2009) On the similarity metric and the distance metric. Theoret Comput Sci 410(24):2365–2376
Cover TM, Thomas JA (1991) Elements of information theory. Wiley, New York
Cracolici MF, Cuffaro M, Nijkamp P (2009) Tourism sustainability and economic efficiency—a statistical analysis of italian provinces. Serie Research Memoranda 0023, VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Econometrics
Dueck G, Scheuer T (1990) Threshold accepting: a general purpose optimization algorithm appearing superior to simulated annealing. J Comput Phys 90(1):161–175
Dwyer L, Forsyth P, Spurr R (2004) Evaluating tourism’s economic effects: new and old approaches. Tour Manag 25(3):307–317
Egilmez G, Gumus S, Kucukvar M (2015) Environmental sustainability benchmarking of the US and Canadametropoles: an expert judgment-based multi-criteria decision making approach. Cities 42:31–41
Emel J, Lewis PG, Wheeler JO (1997) Is capitalism sustainable? Political economy and the politics of ecology. Urban Geogr 18(1):90–93
European Commissiion (2013) Study on the feasibility of a European tourism indicator system for sustainable management at destination level. http://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/tourism/offer/sustainable/indicators/. Accessed 3 Oct 2016
European Commission (2018) Horizon 2020—work programme 2018–2020. http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/wp/2018-2020/main/h2020-wp1820-energy_en.pdf. Accessed 18 May 2019
Font X, McCabe S (2017) Sustainability and marketing in tourism: its contexts, paradoxes, approaches, challenges and potential. J Sustain Tour 25(7):869–883
Frechtling DC (1999) The tourism satellite account: foundations, progress and issues. Tour Manag 20(1):163–170
Getz D, Timur S (2005) Stakeholder involvement in sustainable tourism: balancing the voices. In: Theobald WF (ed) Global tourism, 3rd edn. Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, pp 230–247
Gilli M, Schumann E (2011) Optimal enough? J Heuristics 17(4):373–387
Gilli M, Winker P (2009) Heuristic optimization methods in econometrics. In: Belsley DA, Kontoghiorghes E (eds) Handbook of computational econometrics. Wiley, New York
Gilli M, Maringer D, Schumann E (2011) Numerical methods and optimization in finance, 1st edn. Elsevier, Amsterdam
Gooroochurn N, Sugiyarto G (2005) Competitiveness indicators in the travel and tourism industry. Tour Econ 11(1):25–43
Graham S, Aurigi A (1997) Urbanising cyberspace? City 2(7):18–39
Gras R, Benoit M, Deffontaines JP (1989) Le Fait Technique en Agronomie, Activité Agricole, Cocepts et Méthodes d’étude. L’Hamarttan, Paris France
Gyou Ko T (2005) Development of a tourism sustainability assessmentprocedure: a conceptual approach. Tour Manag 26(3):431–445
Hellendoorn H, Thomas C (1993) Defuzzification in fuzzy controllers. J Intell Fuzzy Syst 1(2):109–123
Holland JH (1992) Adaptation in natural and artificial systems, 2nd edn. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor
Horibe Y (1985) Entropy and correlation. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern SMC 15(5):641–642
Kennedy J, Eberhart RC (1995) Particle swarm optimization. In: Proceedings of the 1995 IEEE international conference on neural networks, vol 4, pp 1942–1948. IEEE Service Center, Piscataway
Kvålseth TO (2017) On normalized mutual information: measure derivations and properties. Entropy 19:631
Ladkin A, Bertramini AM (2002) Collaborative tourism planning: a case study of Cusco, Peru. Curr Issues Tour 5(2):71–93
Markwick MC (2000) Golf tourism development, stakeholders, differing discourses and alternative agendas: the case of malta. Tour Manag 21(5):515–524
Marsal-Llacuna M-L, Colomer-Llinàs J, Meléndez-Frigola J (2015) Lessons in urban monitoring taken from sustainable and livable cities to better address the smart cities initiative. Technol Forecast Soc Chang 90:611–622
Mason P (2003) Tourism impacts, planning and management. Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford
May V (1991) Tourism, environment and development: values, sustainability and stewardship. Tour Manag 12(2):112–118
Middleton V, Hawkins R (1998) Sustainable tourism: a marketing perspective. Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford
Miller G (2001) The development of indicators for sustainable tourism: results of a delphi survey of tourism researchers. Tour Manag 22(4):351–362
Mitchell G, May A, McDonald A (1995) Picabue: a methodological framework for the development of indicators of sustainable development. Int J Sustain Dev World Ecol 2(2):104–123
Moscato P, Fontanari JF (1990) Stochastic versus deterministic update in simulated annealing. Phys Lett A 146(4):204–208
Nash D, Butler R (1990) Towards sustainable tourism. Tour Manag 11(3):263–264
Phillis YA, Kouikoglou VS, Verdugo C (2017) Urban sustainability assessment and ranking of cities. Comput Environ Urban Syst 64:254–265
Sardianou E, Kostakis I, Mitoula R, Gkaragkani V, Lalioti E, Theodoropoulou E (2016) Understanding the entrepreneurs’ behavioural intentions towards sustainable tourism: a case study from greece. Environ Dev Sustain 18(3):857–879
Shannon CE (1948) A mathematical theory of communication. Bell Syst Tech J 27:623–656
Smart Cities Council (2016) The hill: at smart cities week, tackling opportunities and challenges. https://smartcitiescouncil.com/article/hill-smart-cities-week-tackling-opportunities-and-challenges. Accessed 3 Oct 2016
United Nations (2018a) The 2030 agenda for sustainable development. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2018/overview/. Accessed 18 May 2019
United Nations (2018b) One planet network—sustainable tourism. http://www.oneplanetnetwork.org/sustainable-tourism. Accessed 18 May 2019
Waligo VM, Clarke J, Hawkins R (2013) Implementing sustainable tourism: a multi-stakeholder involvement management framework. Tour Manag 36:342–353
Wall G, Mathieson A (2006) Tourism: change, impacts, and opportunities, 2nd edn. Pearson Prentice Hall, New York
World Economic Forum (2017) The travel & tourism competitiveness report2017. Technical report, World Economic Forum
World Tourism Organization (WTO) (2004) Indicators of sustainable development for tourism destinations: a guidebook. Technical report, World Tourism Organization
World Tourism Organization (WTO) (2016) The concept of sustainable tourism. http://sdt.unwto.org/content/about-us-5/. Accessed 3 Oct 2016
Zadeh LA (1973) Outline of a new approach to the analysis of complex systems and decision processes. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern 3(1):28–44
Zadeh LA (1975) The concept of a linguistic variable and its application to approximate reasoning-i. Inf Sci 8(3):199–249
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Research involving human participants and/or animals
This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.
Additional information
Communicated by V. Loia.
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Andria, J., di Tollo, G. & Pesenti, R. A heuristic fuzzy algorithm for assessing and managing tourism sustainability. Soft Comput 24, 4027–4040 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-019-04170-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-019-04170-5