Since the early stages of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), one of the application scenarios that have been affected the most by this new paradigm is mobility. Smart Cities have greatly benefited from the awareness of some people’s habits to develop efficient mobility services. In particular, knowing how people use public transportation services and move throughout urban infrastructure is crucial in several areas, among which the most prominent are tourism and transportation. Indeed, especially for Public Transportation Companies (PTCs), long- and short-term planning of the transit network requires having a thorough knowledge of the flows of passengers in and out vehicles. Thanks to the ubiquitous presence of Internet connections, this knowledge can be easily enabled by sensors deployed on board of public transport vehicles. In this paper, a Wi-Fi-based Automatic Bus pAssenger CoUnting System, named iABACUS, is presented. The objective of iABACUS is to observe and analyze urban mobility by tracking passengers throughout their journey on public transportation vehicles, without the need for them to take any action. Test results proves that iABACUS efficiently detects the number of devices with an active Wi-Fi interface, with an accuracy of 100% in the static case and almost 94% in the dynamic case. In the latter case, there is a random error that only appears when two bus stops are very close to each other.

In order to achieve a sustainable mobility environment, an efficient public transport framework, in which different means and companies coexist, is essential. An integrated fare system thus needs to exist, along with an agreement among the service providers for ticket revenue sharing (clearing), to avoid creating a barrier to the adoption of public transport, since users tend to be overwhelmed by many tickets and several purchase methods. The results of an extensive review of the current state of the art, regarding the possible solutions for ticket validation, which can be provided to the users by the service providers, lead to identifying a solution, whose aim is to combine the needs of both users and providers, by developing a system to simplify user experience, while at the same time collecting precious data for service monitoring and planning. This will be practically achieved through a flexible ticket validation system which will make use of three different technologies (QR codes, GPS and Bluetooth). The contributions of this work are: i) greater flexibility in ticket validation obtained by using multiple technologies; ii) the novelty of a gamification layer applied to mobile ticketing; iii) the identification of a method for obtaining clearing-related data. The adoption of multiple technologies introduces different benefits: to the users, who will be able to complete trips on multiple vehicles without worrying about ticket compatibility; and to the companies, who will be free to choose among the multiple options, and will thus not be forced to adopt a single technological solution. The main expected result is the collection of key validation related information, which will be exploited mainly for clearing purposes and possibly even in real time for optimizing fleet management.