Automated Passenger Counting (APC) systems and their use in transport companies. Benchmarking among different APC systems: technical, functional and economic analysis.

Nowadays, the idea of tracking and counting people at specific places has been subject of many studies. The main objective is to consider and transform people into active actors of future Smart Cities. The context of this thesis is the research and exploration of Automated Passenger Counting (APC) systems applied to public transport. The objective is to present a clear picture of the opportunities and challenges of APC systems derived from the study and benchmarking of different solutions present on the market. The benchmarking is based on a multicriteria analysis considering devices' characteristics and business strategies of the selling companies. The idea is to offer an explicit definition of the main characteristics of the system’s components, to allow a more informed and conscious allocation of resources and smarter decision processes, for both clients and sellers. A methodology has been developed to achieve the desired results. The first step is the discovery of the major companies present on the market. Then, devices' information, functional and technical characteristics have been analysed to end analysing the competitors' side and their business strategies. Great attention has been paid to distinguish companies which act as manufacturers of hardware components of the system, and those which instead work as system integrators. According to this last group, further analyses have been conducted on their business models and the offered “level of integration". It is important to highlight that the information available online are quite limited, especially business strategies data. For this reason, direct interviews and calls have been conducted to fill the lack of information. Moreover, an ad hoc survey has been conceived, designing a web questionnaire administered both directly to the transport companies and to the associations, ANAV (Associazione Nazionale Autotrasporto Viaggiatori) and ASSTRA (Associazione Trasporti) that disseminated the survey to all their associates. The sampling plan follows the snowball approach. Based on the data collection, criteria have been defined ranging from devices to companies' characteristics (accuracy, costs, pricing model, etc.), laying the groundwork for the benchmark analysis. The key aspects of the benchmark include the evaluation of the performance, the comparison between different activities and processes, the identification of the "best practices" and of the areas to improve. "Key Performance Indicators" have been then developed focusing on the needs of the companies, central elements of the performance monitoring process. The last step consists in the analysis of the results using ELECTRE II, a multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. The results of this method propose different combination and comparison of weighted criteria, highlighting the best practices, offering additional and greater knowledge to companies and clients. The results are useful to public transport companies, manufacturers, and system integrator companies. Public transport companies ease the selection of APC systems, while manufacturers and system integrators can build their revenue models tailored on the clients' needs. At best of our knowledge this is the first study on the state-of-the-art review of APC. The results are the first step to better support transport companies in the selection of the APC systems, that are now mandatory to monitor the service, as requested by the Transport Authorities.