Nowadays, the technological equipment of urban passenger transport systems requires a high level of financial investment. Thus, fleets are often not modernised with suitable technologies which make public transport more attractive through improvements and service optimisation.

The cause of the lack of investment can be found in the high cost of including different independent systems (ticket system, localisation, information, communications), since each of these systems entails individual acquisition, installation, training and maintenance costs.

There are also costs relating to the integration of the data provided by the different sub-systems in order to extract valid information from the shared knowledge.

In some of the most advanced systems on the market, interconnection of the embedded sub-systems is available. However the high cost is still present. Moreover, the installation of different sub-systems implies an increase in the risk of failure in any of the elements, which reduces the dependability of the current distributed solutions.