SCIENZA DELLA COMPLESSITÀ E BENI CULTURALI

Science of Complexity meets cultural heritage at least in two ways: on the one hand, one may regard the "objects" of cultural heritage as "complex systems"; on the other hand, it would be useful to employ techniques and tools borrowed from Science of Complexity in monitoring of archaeological sites. Activities of the Institute for Complex Systems of the National Research Council of Italy (ISC-CNR) just match those two aspects in monitoring the Archaeological Park of Coliseum: on the one hand, the monuments of the Park will be studied as mechanical complex systems under the action of dynamical forcing of various nature; a mathematical model of them will be defined, to forecast their behaviour for different forcing conditions. On the other hand, seismometric data will be analyzed via Science of Complexity techniques, to highlight all the non-linear couplings among the different elements of the system, and causal relationships. The high goal is to put stochastic forcing elements into the play: the presence of noise in the model equations will aim at controlling the most hazardous behaviours of the mechanical structures and external forcing; meanwhile, the statistical analysis of seismic noise data will be able to observe ageing and degradation processes of the relics, drawing the attention to the approaching of possible catastrophic responses.