OPTIMa

About

A smart, data-driven platform to make tourism in Madeira more sustainable and enjoyable.

OPTIMa proposes an integrated technological platform to address the growing challenges of tourism management on Madeira Island — from overtourism and resource pressure to uneven visitor distribution and limited cultural engagement. The platform combines physical monitoring infrastructure, AI-driven decision-making, economic incentives, and cultural narrative enhancement within a single cohesive ecosystem.

At its core, a network of solar-powered sensors is strategically deployed at key tourist sites. These stations communicate over Long Range (LoRa) networks and process data locally through edge computing nodes, delivering precise occupancy measurements while fully preserving visitor anonymity.

A locally deployed Large Language Model (LLM), fine-tuned specifically for Madeira, powers multilingual visitor assistance, context-aware recommendations, and location-specific cultural storytelling — all without reliance on external cloud services, ensuring data sovereignty.

A dynamic pricing module and adaptive itinerary generator use real-time occupancy data, weather conditions, and individual visitor profiles to redistribute tourist flows, incentivise visits to underutilised sites, and promote sustainable mobility patterns across the island.

Project Highlights

• 📡
  Privacy-first sensing
  Solar-powered IoT stations with on-device processing and anonymous density metrics over LoRa networks.
• 🤖
  Local LLM for Madeira
  An open-source LLM fine-tuned on regional cultural and tourism data, running on local infrastructure.
• 💶
  Dynamic pricing & flow redistribution
  Algorithmic access cost adjustment to ease congestion and direct visitors to underexplored destinations.
• 🏛️
  Digital cultural storytelling
  LLM-generated narratives tied to specific locations, transforming passive visits into interactive cultural experiences.