Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Regional public transport information landscapes play a key role in shaping passengers’ ability to plan and undertake journeys, yet they remain difficult to navigate. In many regions, passenger information is fragmented across multiple websites and applications, creating barriers to adoption and limiting the modal shift required to achieve CO2 emission targets. Although a growing body of evidence suggests an increasing interest in conversational systems for public transport, existing solutions have largely focused on narrow segments of the passenger journey. This study proposes a framework for developing modular passenger-facing agentic conversational systems, combining a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) component for textual information with a ReAct-inspired agentic routing component for transit network information. The framework includes a reproducible methodology for tuning and evaluating both components and is validated through a real-world pilot deployment in the Oeste region of Portugal, where three public transport operators serve 388,000 residents across 203 bus routes. Results showed reliable component-level performance on unseen evaluation datasets. User-based evaluation further indicated fitness for use, with participants reporting high overall satisfaction. The findings thus establish a baseline for agentic conversational systems in multi-operator public transport settings, and the framework’s reliance on standardized data formats supports transferability to other regions.
Author: Berthele, Louis Jacob
Institution: Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7161216136