Moving from reactive to proactive passenger management.

The Waterbus, a ferry service on the river Schelde in Antwerp, operates in a transport environment where accurate, real-time passenger data is surprisingly hard to come by.

Crew members need to know exactly how many passengers and bicycles are on board at any given moment, not as a rough estimate but as a verified count they can act on and communicate to passengers.

Beyond headcounts, operational staff need visibility into individual passenger flows: who boards and disembarks at which station, and how those patterns shift throughout the day. And for passengers themselves, a frictionless digital payment experience linked to their actual journey, from boarding point to destination, remains an unmet expectation.

Without reliable data on these three fronts, capacity planning becomes guesswork, safety monitoring stays reactive rather than proactive, and the kind of usage insights that could help grow waterborne transport as a sustainable alternative to road-based commuting simply don't exist.

Enter Made.

Data transparency through sensor-based passenger counting and real-time payment monitoring.

The concepts and prototype developed in this project give the Waterbus operator a foundation to transform how the service is run and experienced.

Accurate, sensor-based passenger counting removes ambiguity from a process that was previously manual and error-prone. Crew can trust the numbers on their control display and relay occupancy status to waiting passengers with confidence.

For operational staff, station-level data on boarding and alighting patterns opens up smarter scheduling and capacity allocation, making it possible to match supply to actual demand rather than relying on fixed timetables and assumptions.

Real-time digital payment monitoring connects the passenger's journey to a seamless transaction, while giving crew and back-office teams instant visibility into revenue flows. And on a broader level, the usage data generated by the system supports the kind of evidence-based planning that cities need to justify investment in waterborne public transport and encourage more commuters to make the switch.

A smooth integration of both existing and new data sources.

The project moved through four phases: field research, ideation, prototyping, and mobile application development.

It started with on-site analysis aboard the Waterbus itself, where the team observed boarding procedures, crew workflows, and the physical constraints of counting passengers in a boat environment. Alongside this fieldwork, a technological scan mapped available sensor technologies against the specific challenges of river transport, including changing light conditions, weather exposure, and unpredictable boarding patterns at open-air stations.

From this research base, the team developed several design concepts built around three core principles. First, non-intrusive sensors that collect reliable occupancy data without compromising passenger privacy. Second, adaptable technology that performs consistently across the variable conditions typical of waterborne transport. Third, integration capability with the operator's existing ticketing and fleet management systems.

The most promising concepts were brought to life in a working prototype: a sensor rig installed on a Waterbus, paired with a control display that gives crew a real-time view of passenger counts and boarding status. A mobile application was developed in parallel, addressing the digital payment flow and providing passengers with a connected journey experience from embarkation to arrival.

The result is a tested, tangible proof of concept that bridges the gap between the operational realities of river transport and the data-driven standards expected of modern public mobility systems.