Performance of urban Public Transport services: influence of exogenous factors on targeted and delivered quality assessed through ITS. = Prestazioni di servizi di trasporto pubblico urbano di superficie con conducente: valutazione mediante ITS dell'influenza di fattori esogeni sulla qualità programmata ed erogata.

This M. Sc. thesis in Civil Engineering with specialisation in Transport systems deals with the performance of urban Public Transport services with a driver, namely buses and tramways; it proposes a method and two case studies related to the assessment of exogenous factors on targeted and delivered quality of PT services equipped with ITS (“Prestazioni di servizi di trasporto pubblico urbano di superficie con conducente: valutazione mediante ITS dell'influenza di fattori esogeni sulla qualità programmata ed erogata”).For the two case studies the company supervisors have been Mrs. Jennifer Bogner (Wiener Linien, Vienna) and Mr. Alberto Forchino (GTT, Turin), M.Sc. Eng. The purpose of this work has been to study the dependence of some of the most important time-related performance indicators (average speed and its regularity) on the so-called exogenous factors. These are elements which influence how well the Public Transport Operator is able to deliver the service but which are not in its ability to control. Day-type, day-time, vehicle type, infrastructure type, traffic lights (keeping into consideration if those give priority to the Public Transport) have been those considered.This analysis work has the aim to be a preliminary study for starting the development of a method to evaluate from the beginning, according to the context, the performances that a Public Transport service will be able to guarantee according to the resources made available for it. This is considered to be useful to clarify requirement parameters between the Public Administration and the service provider for the duration of the contract.All of this has been done taking advantage of ITS instruments available. These are effectively capable to collect data continuously and provide a significant view over the whole phenomenon.At first, an analysis of the state of the art, both academic and regulatory, has been carried our in order to gather information about the instruments already available for similar purposes.Then the focus has been directed at finding which exogenous factors mainly influence the Public Transport performances.During the first step, a preliminary study of what happens in Vienna has been done looking back at stored data concerning, on one hand, some segments of the net where both bus and tram run and, on the other hand, two whole lines, one bus and one tram, in order to understand the behavior according to different conditions.During the second step, instead, a methodology has been developed and tested in Turin with day by day observation of events. This methodology has to be flexible and reproducible also in other countries and cities and therefore it has been chosen to obtain data through SIRI (Standard Interface for Real-time Information). This one, in fact, is a European Standard and allows this operation to be done everywhere it is implemented.Finally, some comments and suggestions for future investigations have been proposed.