The use of the EVOLVE testbed will allow the implementation of necessary workflows and evaluate them in three case studies, as follows.

• Case 1: PTO monitoring, controlling, validating bus services in a medium-size urban area and peripheral rural areas.
• Case 2: PTO assessing bus services to improve service planning.
• Case 3: PTA requiring data on service performance to support bus service planning.

In addition, EVOLVE will also encompass the use of data collected during the Public Transport service operation to improve the overall city/mobility planning (in order to enlarge the project’s benefits from transport market to the whole society).

Public Transport (PT) services represent one of the main instruments for improving the competitiveness and social cohesion of our cities. Recent developments in ICT/ITS such as consolidation of supporting systems for bus operation, mobile applications, availability of large distributed platforms, increased opportunities for data computation, have had a strong impact on bus services management.

In consequence, these advances have increased significantly the volume of data and how data is perceived in the bus market. However, currently, the use of IT is limited to the assessment of bus service operation rather than the improvement of mobility governance or overall city mobility planning.

The main limitations/drawbacks in this domain today are:

• The service validation procedures are still partially carried out manually by Public Transport Operators (PTO).
• The current workflow limits the automatic transmission/sharing of data between PTO and Public Transport Authorities (PTA) and the efficiency/consistency of the feedback to be provided to the planning phase and to overall mobility/city planning.
• Small PTOs/PTAs have insufficient resources/budget constraints to allocate the required resources.