From 10 – 11 February 2015, the OSJD (Organisation for Cooperation between Railways) organised a meeting of railway experts in Warsaw on the subject: “Seat reservation systems, reference information, service for passengers, service rendering and accounting for transportation.”
This meeting was chaired by Mr Viktor Koshanov, chairman of the OSJD Commission on Passenger Traffic. 11 Railway Undertakings who are OSJD members, attended this meeting.
The following main points were discussed:
- 1. Consideration of issues on seat reservation systems when issuing a return journey on international trains in the case of a timetable change.
- 2. Extension of rendering services to passengers in international traffic as part of issuance of travel documents via Internet.
- 3. Consideration of issues on including the element of “Wagon owner” in joint OSJD/UIC leaflet 918-1.
- 4. Discussion of issues on rendering services to passengers in international traffic with use of MERITS-PRIFIS systems.
- 5. Updating “Information on people responsible for operational issues (technology, sales and issuance of travel documents) of electronic reservation systems within OSJD”
In point 2, some railway undertakings from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Mongolia, Kazakhstan reported that they are developing (or they intend to develop) new barcodes on tickets (2D, 3D).
Mr Marc Guigon (UIC Senior Advisor Passenger Transport) reported that some UIC members are developing a Universal Rail Ticket (URT) – see article on previous meeting in eNews 432 – to include a barcode with advanced functionalities.
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 the URT group defines in detail each message to be exchanged in the process sequence diagrams defined in Part 1.
The URT work group continues to meet every month and the next meetings in 2015 will be from 18 – 19 March in Bucharest, 8 – 9 April in Istanbul and 6 – 7 May in Moscow. All UIC mobile ticketing experts are very welcome to participate.
Marc Guigon suggested comparing the different developments (UIC and OSJD) during the URT meeting in Moscow from 6 – 7 May 2015.
In point 4, Marc Guigon was asked many questions and to make technical clarifications with regard to the Merits and Prifis tools. The main points are described below:
• When a railway undertaking uploads new timetable data in one file, all the old data are removed from the Merits system. Marc Guigon recommends that the members provide one file containing all data (i.e. domestic trains and international trains in one file)
• UIC will organise a technical training session in Minsk in the next few months. The other OSJD members are welcome to participate
• Some OSJD members who are not yet Merits members are very interested in joining the Merits community in order to benefit from this tool
The president of the OSJD Commission for Passenger Traffic suggested that UIC participates in the next Passenger Commission in September 2015 in order to define some common subjects for 2016.
