The activities during last months have been following the development of a specific instrument within the OPTICITIES project, the Decision Support Tool, for two of the six pilot cities: Birmingham and Torino. These cities are here considered like study cases in order to compare their methods of software development. The followed methodology is composed of a phase of literature analysis of the field, an activity of data collection, the analysis of the collected information and the elaboration of a comparison between every phases of DST development in the two cities.

Before describing the remarks carried by my own work I propose an analysis of the scientific literature about Decision Support System and DST, implementing a theoretical framework to analyze the recent development of these instruments and provide a vision for their evolution in the future.

In detail, the first chapter contains definitions about themes and tools analyzed in the thesis, followed by an historical background, the propose of study cases (London dashboard, Dublin dashboard, VIAJEO project) and future prospects.

In the second chapter it is presented the European project OPTICITIES, followed by the framing of the cities of Torino and Birmingham in their specific contexts and within the project itself.

The third chapter goes into detail of the activities carried out under this thesis, in fact it describes the development stages of the DST in which I took part, and it specifies objectives and work methodology through four general stages: (I) data collection phase about project preparation, (II) software development and its technical specifies, (III) experimentation phase and training activities, (IV) finalization of the project.

The fourth chapter contains the results of the investigations and their critical analysis.