Application of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps in the Strategic Performance Management of the Tourism Industry Graubünden

In the context of strategy development of companies and other organizations, the recognition and use of relevant trends occupies a prominent position. Information from forums, blogs or social networks should help partners in the tourism industry to adapt to important trends and to incorporate them into their strategies. In the present project, the identification and evaluation of these developments will be systematized by using fuzzy logic. So-called. Fuzzy Cognitive Maps visualize the interrelationships.
The tourism industry in Graubünden serves as a test field. Due to the current economic situation and the strong franc, the pressure of suffering is particularly high there. One cannot and should not differentiate oneself in the competition by price policy alone, but must increasingly take into account the needs and wishes of different stakeholders. For this reason, it is important to recognize new trends early on and to take advantage of them. A broad spectrum of participating business partners - locations, hotels, tourism organizations and transport companies from the region - ensure the practical relevance of the project results.
In the first part of the project, intelligent agents (so-called web crawlers) are used to obtain raw data on specific content from social media. In order to be able to evaluate the raw data, data and relationships are represented with fuzzy cognitive maps in a second part of the project. Fuzzy logic knows not only the classical truth values true (value 1) and false (value 0), but all possible gradations between these two extreme values. Zoom and filter operators allow the user to browse the fuzzy cognitive maps and search for interesting patterns of different demand groups. A slider ensures that relevant constellations are detected.
In the third part of the project, the trends or the resulting conclusions are anchored in the respective strategies and organizations together with the application partners. In the process, the individual strategic alignments are developed or existing ones are audited. In the context of strategy implementation, key figures, measures and project plans are systematically monitored with the help of a management cockpit in order to anchor the strategies in the organizations.
The planned procedure represents a novel approach in the implementation of performance management. With the fuzzy logic, largely unused data and relationships are filtered from the web, evaluated and checked for relevance, detached from limited subjective perspectives. Trends are to be recognized at an early stage in order to react accordingly. The example of the tourism industry in Graubünden will be used to demonstrate the benefits of this interdisciplinary approach. The planned software can also be applied to other regions or industries.