Organizational structures of urban public transport - a diagrammatic comparison with UML

Abstract

Abstract Research presented in this paper aims to develop a methodology to depict organizational structures of urban public transport diagrammatically, and to depict organizational structures with this methodology. The goal is to make it possible to compare different organizational structures of public transport services diagrammatically and to analyze the role of the organizational structure in association with usability of public transport. With various business modeling methodologies reviewed, the methodology used in this paper is based on UML (Unified Modeling Language) because this provides a powerful analytical method to create diagrams from various data and information sources. With data and information collected from literature and visits, as a first attempt, five generic diagrams are created to depict developments of public transport organizations from one representing fairly simple collective transport undertakings to another representing typical modern public transport undertaking. Several city-specific diagrams are created to represent various complex organizational structures of urban public transport with a focus set on users’ points of view. The method based on UML enables simple and easy-to-understand diagrammatic comparison of various organizational structures with a large extent of flexibility. It enables successful depiction of evolution of the organizational structure of urban public transport. The user-focused city-specific depictions and a comparison of them highlights that the organizational structure, especially whether there is a system integrator from users’ points of view, does have a strong influence on usability.