From 6 to 8 February, 2024, 40 IT experts in rail ticket distribution from 25 companies took part in the Ticket Security Group (TSG) meeting, chaired by Kurt De Vriendt, the Ticket Layout Group (TLG) meeting, chaired by David Sarfatti, and the Passengers Services Solutions (PSS) Group meeting, chaired by Clemens Gantert. These sessions were held in Rome, Italy, and hosted by FS Technology,
In TSG, the railway experts in barcode ticketing updated the participants on the UIC Flexible Content Barcode (FCB) used by the Polish State Railways (PKP), Trenitalia, Deutsche Bahn (DB), the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB), the Dutch Railways (NS) and Eurail. FCB is now available on phones (via DOSIPASS), and is secured with Elliptic Curve DSA encoding and double asymmetric encryption by both the ticket issuer and railway app. While this was already released in 2023 on Android phones, Trenitalia shared their development of a new iOS version. The experts then discussed improvements to the UIC Public Key Management Website (PKMW) (railpublickey.uic.org) and the updated UIC Control App for TLB and FCB developed by Eurail.
The TLG participants, with PKP taking the lead, presented updates on the Universal Rail Ticket (URT), a new rail ticket layout to allow customers to print or show all information for different legs and fares on a single ticket, with or without a “through ticket”. IRS 90918-8 and TAP-TSI TD B11 will be updated accordingly at end 2024.
The UIC eTicket Control Database (eTCD), a central system facilitating electronic ticket checks, has been in production since 2020. By 2024, the Czech Railways (CD), the Luxembourg National Railway Company (CFL), DB, Danish State Railways (DSB), EURAIL, NS, PKP, the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), the National Railway Company of Belgium (SNCB), Trenitalia, and the Railway Company of Slovakia (ZSSK) were already connected. ÖBB, the Slovenian Railways (SZ), and the Hungarian State Railways (MÁV/Gysev) also aim to connect by the end of the year.
Finally, the attendees discussed eTCD improvements, opening it to non-UIC members, and defined the eTCD 2024 Developments Roadmap.
In PSS, Marc Guigon, UIC Passenger Director (until his retirement in March), warmly thanked the participants and the chair for their vital achievements over the last 10 years, and wished them the same success for the future. Under Guigon’s leadership, 2024 saw a complete set of UIC standards and databases for European distribution interoperability being released.
UIC technical solutions now cover all ticket distribution steps for all rail and other transport modes, including itineraries, sales, fulfilment, control, persons with reduced mobility (PRM), aftersales, and accounting.
The experts then shared information on reservation system replacement within Europe, following DB EPA’s decommissioning, with companies providing updates on the release of their new systems. Next, Hitrail gave a presentation on the Hermes to OSDM translator, which will be deployed in February 2024, followed by rail undertakings updating their OSDM APIs in 2024 and 2025.
Finally, in the afternoon, the OSDM technical roadmap and priorities were decided on for the upcoming release. OSDM JSON files and API are open source, and are freely available on GitHub on http://osdm.io.
The next TSG, TLG and PSS plenary meetings will take place from 11 to 13 June, 2024 in Warsaw, Poland.
