Ontology based performance evaluation of public transport systems

Offering high levels of quality of service (e.g. punctuality and frequency) and performance (e.g. effectiveness and efficiency) for users of public transport systems is a great challenge for governments and transportation authorities. Various research works have been conducted to develop criteria to evaluate the performance of Public Transport Systems (PTS). However, there is still a need to design and develop decision support tools that both encompass and take advantage of the increasing number and diversity of the suggested Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and performance evaluation methods. The main purpose of this paper is to develop a decision support system that relies on ontologies to represent, capture, store and use knowledge to evaluate the performance of PTS. An implementation of the system is also presented and discussed.