Integrating MCDA Methods into the Digital Twin's Decision-Making Loop

Digital twins have expanded from industrial maintenance to territorial and heritage management. Cultural and archaeological heritage sites, such as the Morbihan Megaliths recently inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, face a structural challenge: dynamically managing visitor flows, logistics, and maintenance while balancing the conflicting objectives of conservation, tourism enhancement, and cost control. Converting predictive scenarios into auditable operational decisions under uncertainty remains an open problem. We propose a closed-loop decision architecture embedding Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis at the core of the simulation loop, conferring a prescriptive, human-supervised, and traceable status on the digital twin. A comparative framework positions major MCDA families with respect to four operational axes: execution latency, robustness to disturbances, configuration effort, and interpretability. A context-driven meta-module then selects and switches the appropriate method according to decision tempo and data quality, supporting operational, tactical, and strategic management horizons.

Keywords: Digital twin, territorial digital twin, multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), UNESCO World Heritage, territorial management.