The MERITS Time Table Expert Group (TTEG) meeting was held on 30 and 31 March 2017 at the kind invitation of Trenitalia.
The TTEG is the community of Railway Undertakings that publishes consolidated timetables, services and station data (MERITS data) to be used by railway undertakings in information systems to support journey planners and booking activities.
25 participants representing 15 railway companies were present.
UIC was represented by Marc Guigon, Senior Advisor for Passenger Transport, Fabrice Setta, Senior Advisor for eBusiness and Joachim Baars, expert on timetables.
Ms Frederica Santini, Chief Strategy Officer of Trenitalia presented the strategic views of Trenitalia.
Mr Danilo Gismondi, Director of Information Technology of Trenitalia, presented the Trenitalia sales and distribution platform.
Mr Maurizio Capotorto, Director Industrial Planning Direction within Trenitalia, presented the New Timetable System (NTS) in Trenitalia.
Marc Guigon (UIC) gave a presentation on proposals on the future of Merits, and the decisions to be taken by UIC members during the next Commercial and Distribution forum on 4 April 2017.
Frank Martini (HaCon) highlighted the main modifications concerning the Merits tool, in order to help Merits members to be compliant with the TAP-TSI regulation: “make available all its timetable data to railway undertakings, third parties and public bodies”.
Main modifications concern the delivery format, the identification of services to be exported (filtering), the management of download area, the matching with other railway undertaking data.
Henrik Nyman (SJ/Linkon) presented the main improvements concerning the MERITS user guide.
Joachim Baars (UIC) presented some questions concerning delivery of data and gave some advice to members to enhance the quality of data.
Angelina Rotolo-Piazza (DB Vertrieb, as data manager) reported on the Merits data management activity, and proposed some improvements of the system to enhance the data quality.
All participants discussed the ways to enhance the quality of Merits data for the use of railway undertakings.
Roberta Rizzo (International relations in Trenitalia) presented the newly established TAP TSI Governance Association (TSGA) and the regulatory services which will be procured by this governance: Registry, Data Quality Management (DQM), Retail Reference Data (RRD) and Administrative services.
Gianluca Giacco (Timetable data manager in Trenitalia) presented the views of Trenitalia concerning Location ID, territorial principle.
The next meeting will be held from 12 – 13 October 2017 in Stockholm.
