A System-Level Design for a Public Transportation Information System in Costa Rica

Service information for passengers is a major factor in promoting the use of public transportation and enhancing user satisfaction. Implementing a comprehensive digital information system for travelers is a complex task that requires expertise in Intelligent Public Transportation Systems and, more broadly, in developing Enterprise Architectures. Costa Rica currently lacks diagnoses or plans for a large-scale implementation of such systems. In this paper the contributions are, first, an overview of the application of digital technologies in the transit system in Costa Rica, and second, a set of design principles and architectural decisions that are relevant to transit information systems and are specifically tailored for deployment in Costa Rica. For this purpose, this work adopts the Architecture Development Method (ADM) cycle, as proposed by The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), along with reference architectures and data specifications like the Architecture Reference for Cooperative and Intelligent Transportation (ARC-IT), the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), and the Smart Data Models framework, among others.