Design and testing of an agent chatbot supporting decision making with public transport data

Assessing the quality of public transportation services requires the analysis of large quantities of data on the scheduled and actual trips and documents listing the quality constraints each service needs to meet. Interrogating such datasets with SQL queries, organizing and visualizing the data can be quite complex for most users. This paper presents a chatbot offering a user-friendly tool to interact with these datasets and support decision making. It is based on an agent architecture, which expands the capabilities of the core Large Language Model (LLM) by allowing it to interact with a series of tools that can execute several tasks, like performing SQL queries, plotting data and creating maps from the coordinates of a trip and its stops. This paper also tackles one of the main open problems of such Generative AI projects: collecting data to measure the system's performance. Our chatbot has been extensively tested with a workflow that asks several questions and stores the generated query, the retrieved data and the natural language response for each of them. Such questions are drawn from a set of base examples which are then completed with actual data from the database. This procedure yields a dataset for the evaluation of the chatbot's performance, especially the consistency of its answers and the correctness of the generated queries.