On 14 and 15 January 2015, meeting N°5 Part 2 of the Universal Rail Ticket (URT) Working Group was held in Antwerp.
Organised jointly by the two chairmen of the UIC Ticketing TAG and TAP-NT groups, Kurt De Vriendt and David Sarfatti, the workshop benefited from the participation of Marc Guigon and Fabrice Setta, Senior Advisors in the UIC passenger department; Clemens Gantert, UIC TAP-MD group chairman, Chris Querée, UIC TG Chairman, Leo van der Meulen, NS barcode ticketing expert, Sabine Dambuyant, UIC RCF1 chairwoman, Peter Hertogen, BeNe Distribution expert, ticketing expert Shuichi Myojo from Japan Rail, Senay Gezer and Hans Huisman from Eurail Group and Jan Svensson, Passenger Traffic expert from CIT.
During the first day, the meeting completed the UIC Barcode User guide which gives details on how to implement and control AZTEC Barcode Version 3, defined in UIC leaflet 918-2. This new UIC AZTEC barcode Version 3 proposes flexibility because of its header and thus encompasses all ticket types: IRT, NRT, group tickets and passes.
The barcode is also highly secure because of its strong encryption seal and is therefore acknowledged by NS to open rail station gates in the Netherlands.
NS, SNCB and Eurail Group in Benelux as well as ZSSK in Slovakia are printing this barcode from January 2015 on their RCT2 and print@home tickets. Their railway expert feedback from actual production implementation is a determining factor when writing an efficient user guide for all other UIC rail companies.
The UIC Public Key Management Website https://railpublickey.uic.org/ provides the public keys needed to read and decrypt UIC barcodes in use. Minor modifications to enhance the understanding of the delivery of the keys were decided.
On the second day the meeting carried on with the URT project.
First the meeting discussed with CIT and UIC RCF1 representatives the wording, roles and actions to obtain a common definition for each distribution actor. The new 2015 CIT ticketing manual, FSM initiative, UIC RCF1 accounting group and our UIC URT group shall find a common definition. This lively discussion should continue during the first semester.
The meeting then continued the URT technical definition work.
The first part result of the URT working group in 2014 was the functional description of the rail ticketing processes. URT for the most part describes the mobile app ticketing processes and their interactions with classic CIT paper and print@home rail tickets.
The second part of the URT work in 2015 is the technical description and the messaging composition. Using XML Spy and Enterprise Architect we define in detail each message to be exchanged in the processes sequence diagrams defined in Part 1.
The URT work group continues to meet every month and the next meetings in 2015 will be on 18 March in Bucharest, 8 April in Istanbul and 5 May in Moscow. During these workshops CFR, TCCD and RZD-FPC should display their latest mobile rail ticketing solutions. All UIC mobile ticketing experts are very welcome to participate.
