Identifying Value-Increasing Actions for Cultural Heritage Assets through Sensitivity Analysis of Multicriteria Evaluation Results

This paper presents a brief overview of multicriteria decision making (MCDM) as applied to the evaluation of adaptive reuse projects for cultural heritage assets and proposes a strategy to plan interventions to increase their value. The value of an object can be defined from its fitness to fulfil specified objectives, its significance to the people who own or use it, its potential to produce revenues, and a host of other criteria depending on its nature. These criteria are often subjective, relying on judgements issued by several experts, stakeholders and decision makers. This is why the MCDM methods need to formalize the problem so as to make it suitable to be treated quantitatively. Moreover, its sensitivity to variable opinions must be studied to check the stability of the result. We propose to leverage sensitivity analysis to identify the lines of intervention that promise to be the most effective to increase the value of the asset. A simulated example illustrates this strategy. This approach promises to be useful when assessing the sustainability of a reuse or redevelopment project in the cases where the final destination of the asset is still under examination.