In July 2014, Mr Borys Ostapiuk, General Director of Ukrzaliznytsia (UZ) signed the two Memorandums of Understanding which allow Ukrainian Railways to join the MERITS – PRIFIS community.
He has nominated Maryna Zinenko, Deputy Head of the Division of Information Technologies of UZ, as coordinator for the implementation of MERITS and PRIFIS at UZ.

Merits is the central timetable database of UIC with all train data and all station data within wider Europe. Prifis is also a central database of UIC which contains all tariffs and fares for Non Integrated Reservation Tickets (NRT) and Integrated Reservation Tickets (IRT). All these databases are shared between all the members of the Merits-Prifis community in order to fill their own journey planners with the aim of giving timetable/fare information and/or selling tickets in another country.

During these training meetings, UZ was represented by
• Passenger Department (Mr Igor Breus, head of Department, Ms Svitlana Mol’Chenko, head of tariffs division, Mr Lukov Kutsoloshchenko, head of IT division, Ms Victoria Vovchuk and Ms Tatyana Kosharna, senior specialists)
• IT department (Mr Eugenit Serebryanyi, deputy head, Ms Maryna Zinenko, deputy head of the division and Ms Olena Levchenko, senior technologist)
• Main data centre (Mr Victor Kosenko, chief technologist, Ms Larysa Kobzeva, head of division, Ms Olena Shepel, deputy head of division, Ms Vira Yushchenko and Ms Olean Gurska, senior specialists
• Software sector (Mr Yuriy Ivanenko, head of sector, Mr Igor Anisimov, software developer)

UIC was represented by Marc Guigon, senior advisor passenger transport, Fabrice Setta, senior advisor on information technology, Joachim Baars, UIC timetable expert.

The main topics of this training were as follows:

• Introduction from Mr Igor Breus, head of UZ Main Passenger Administration, who underlined the importance of using the European experience
• General presentation of the issues of MERITS and PRIFIS
• Presentation of technological and technical aspects of MERITS and PRIFIS
• Online use of MERITS server in order to upload Ukrainian data in the MERITS system
• Discussions on the ways to sell European and Ukrainian tickets for passengers

UZ will implement measures to enable interaction with MERITS-PRIFIS in order to update UZ timetable and tariff data. UZ will have access to all integrated timetable and price information to be used in its own system.