OSDM (Open Sales and Distribution Model) is a UIC initiative to substantially simplify and improve the booking process for customers of public transport trips and, to lower complexity and distribution costs for retailers, distributor and carriers. The specifications are defined by experts from different horizons (third party distributors, IT providers and railways) – who meet in an OSDM Technical Workgroup on a voluntary basis – and are made publicly available on www.osdm.io in open source.

Now that the specifications are mature, multiple OSDM implementations are ongoing. To support them and those to come, the OSDM Executive committee (including sector representatives: third party distributors, IT providers and Railways and chaired by Marc Guigon (UIC Passenger Director and vice-chaired by Vittorio Carta, PSG chairman)) discussed how the OSDM Technical Workgroup could provide support to companies willing to implement OSDM.

To reduce their test investment effort and to guarantee the interoperability and the neutrality of the implementation for potential new members, the OSDM Technical Workgroup proposed to provide a catalogue of configurable test scenarios that will be easily adapted to the company environment allowing them to quickly test their new OSDM API.

Bileto, Sqills and Turnit (bus and railway reservation and inventory management solution providers) who are implementing now the OSDM 2.0 version for their railways and buses customers and the Polish Railway PKP are offering to develop this catalogue of scenarios. On behalf of the OSDM Executive committee, UIC would like to thank them for their contribution that is another major milestone in facilitating OSDM’s adoption.

To even go a step further in helping companies to implement OSDM, Sqills has offered to provide the OSDM Executive committee with an automated tool with which any stakeholder can verify if their OSDM API endpoint complies with the jointly agreed implementation scenarios. Later in 2023, every fare provider or carrier that offers an OSDM API can use the software to automatically verify if their implementation adheres to the standards agreed by the community.

Johan Nieuwerth (Sqills Chief Product Officer) explains:
“The cooperation in the OSDM Tech group has been really productive so far, and we’ve recently agreed to actively work together on a documented collection of standardised usage scenarios of the interface. This should lead to easy demonstration of compliance by, and for, all parties involved. By partnering with our colleagues from Turnit, Bileto, and other technical stakeholders in the OSDM workgroup, we will soon have a collection of such “community-driven” scenarios. And we want everyone who is working on implementing their OSDM interface to benefit from this. The tooling we are developing will make it a really easy process to enter the details of your OSDM API endpoint with some input variables such as the Origin/Destination station of a sample trip. From there you will automatically receive a report of how much of the agreed upon OSDM scenarios for a carrier / fare provider are covered by your API. We will use this tool ourselves, and decided to make it available to everyone interested - to contribute to more and better standardisation across the industry.”

The tool in development by Sqills for this purpose and made accessible on-line to anybody willing to implement OSDM, aims for independence and neutrality for any interested party to make use of it. This is achieved in two ways:

• The software itself will be made available under an open-source license.

The validation scenarios that the tool runs through to verify OSDM interface compliance, are managed by the OSDM technical work group. With the delivery of the test scenarios catalogue provided by Bileto, Sqills, Turnit and Polish Railway PKP plus the validation tool developed by Sqills, UIC in the OSDM open framework is providing a neutral and independent means to facilitate and foster OSDM adoption.