Eco-Tourism 2.0: Modeling the Path to Sustainable Growth in the Tourism Industry

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-objective optimization framework for addressing over-tourism by quantitatively evaluating the trade-offs among environmental pressure, economic returns, and social impacts. The framework incorporates two dynamic models: the Logistic growth model for modeling tourist inflow, and the Lotka-Volterra interaction model for capturing the influence of tourism on urban population and cultural systems. An entropy-weighted TOPSIS method is uniformly applied in both models to objectively compute data-driven weights for multiple conflicting objectives. In the Juneau case (Model 1), environmental concerns emerge as the most significant, while in the Venice case (Model 2), social and cultural factors are found to be relatively dominant. Sensitivity analyses demonstrate the robustness and adaptability of the framework, supporting its application in sustainable tourism decision-making across diverse urban contexts.