Agents and Security in a Cultural Assets Transport Scenario

Museums and exhibitions represent a relevant contribution to the economy all over the world. In Italy, in the year 2006 the 400 national museums, monuments and archaeological sites have been visited by 34.492.875 people with an average entrance fee of 6,64 euro for person while in France 18.367.000 people decided to dedicate some time for visiting the national museums. Considered the increasing relevance of the cultural and economical level of museums, several works in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have proposed new methodologies for supporting the users during their visits. However, few research groups have faced the problem of the cultural assets transport. This paper pays attention to a particular aspect of the museum activities: how to identify and to transport in a secure way the cultural assets. In fact, a higher security in transport among museums may increase the exchanges and, consequently, the cultural offer. For reaching this goal we exploited the Galileo Satellite services and the Intelligent Agents technology and we experimented the system in a real scenario.