From 6 – 7 March 2014, UIC participated in the Passenger Commission meeting of the Council for Rail Transport (CRT) of Community of Independent States (CIS) in Chisinau (Moldova).

CFM (Moldovan Railways) was represented by Arcadie Vikol, Deputy Director General for Commercial Activity, Alina Dyachenko, Director of Strategies and International Relations Directorate, Ion Bokshanyan, Head of the Passenger Department, Veceslav Pashkan, Deputy Head of the Passenger Department, Cristina Sirghii, specialist coordinator in the service for Strategies and Investment. A dozen of CFM experts also attended the meeting: Calculation Centre, Railway Stations, Passenger Transport.
UIC was represented by Marc Guigon, Senior Advisor for Passenger Transport, Fabrice Setta, UIC Senior Advisor for eBusiness, and Irina Petrunina.

Svetlana Matveeve, Council Secretary, chief of the Freight and Passenger Department of the directorate of the Council for Rail Transport (CIS countries)
Victor Novoselov, Deputy Head of Infrastructure Division and Federal Agency for Railway Transport (VNIIZhT – Railway Research Institute) and his team attended the meeting.

The railway undertakings which attended this meeting were Moldovan, Russian, Kazakhstan, Lithuanian, Belarus, Ukrainian and Latvian national railways.
The principal aims of this meeting were to present Merits and Prifis activities, to underline the issues related to the tools for Railway Undertakings and to describe in detail the content and use of these tools.

Merits and Prifis are the central timetable databases of UIC with all train data, all station data, tariffs and fares within wider Europe, including Russia and Turkey.

Marc Guigon presented

• The general role of the UIC Passenger Department. He proposed for the audience to be informed, to participate in some working groups or to provide data for these groups, especially:

1. The organisations of the regional services in the framework of the CRTS working group (Commuter and Regional Transport Services)
2. Data concerning the stations to fill in the observatory which will be launched by UIC in the framework of SMGG (Station Manager Global Group)
3. Participation in the next “Nextstation Conference” which will be held in Marrakech end of 2015
4. The Universal Rail Ticket (URT) whose aim is to provide a UIC standard for bar codes

• The issues and advantages of Merits and Prifis for railway undertakings:
• To provide its own timetable and tariffs to the community in order to develop an international clientele
• To get timetables and tariffs of the other railways to sell tickets of other countries
• To have timetables and tariffs
• To be able to position RUs as suppliers of IT software solutions
• The global functionalities of Merits and Prifis systems
• The organisation of Merits and Prifis activities
• The membership of Merits-Prifis community

Some Railway Undertakings expressed their interest in becoming members.

Fabrice Setta presented

• The principles of Merits

1. The standards which are used
2. Principles of train integration – concepts of the territorial principle and information provider
3. The tool Passport for Prifis
4. The online system
5. How to upload and download data
6. Integration workspace
7. User management
8. Online verifications
9. User manual

This meeting took advantage of the fact that the Railway Undertakings could fully understand the issues and functioning of the Merits and Prifis systems before joining the Merits-Prifis community.