Anyone who has travelled is familiar with the dilemma of receiving dozens of confirmation e-mails for trains, hotels, rental cars and cultural events, or having to display various mobile apps for inspections or admission. Making reservations for a trip is time-consuming, as is handling the reservations during the trip. The vision of cross-border, seamless travel using one medium in Europe has existed for a long time.
Three calls for tendering of EU wide projects
Many local projects and initiatives have even achieved some success in this regard. However, different standards in ticketing structures, transmission technologies and inspection infrastructures, compounded by a high level of complexity, have prevented a marketable, cross-border solution from being implemented to date.
As part of the “Smart Cities” initiative of the EU, three projects known as MASAI (Mobility based on Aggregation Services and Application Interconnection) were put out to tender in 2014 for cross-border interoperable e-ticketing systems. With this initiative, the EU is taking action where it is needed and is supporting technological progress to enable the seamless door-to-door travel chain.
As a member of a consortium of five European companies, DB Systel submitted a bid for the tender and was awarded the contract for one of the projects by the EU. Thanks to intensive preparations by the portfolio management of DB Systel, DB Systel can now count on four competent European partners to implement the innovative project together.
DB Smart-In as central platform
DB Systel contributes DB Smart-In to the consortium as the central platform for generating forgery-proof e-authorisations on smartphones.
The partners in the consortium are:
- MTA – a Belgian consulting company that manages the overall coordination of the EU project
- CARD4B – a Portuguese software company, providing software, interoperability middleware and mobile apps for transport, multi-services, tourism and culture, covering ticketing, payment, transport planning, operations management and infotainment
- digimobee – a French consulting company that DB Systel already collaborated with during the development of DB Smart-In (the focus here is on programming the SIM cardlet and on TSM consulting)
- Chess iX – a Dutch company that supported DB Systel during the development of DB Smart-In with the server environment and SAM cluster components
In March 2015, the consortium agreement and the grant agreement with the European Commission were signed by the Managing Directors of DB Systel. The project is scheduled to start on 1 June 2015, developing the operational use cases under the leadership of DB Smart-In’s product management. It is budgeted to a total of ca. EUR 3.3 million and has a duration of 36 months.
During this timeframe, the team of experts responsible will create a design concept for the comprehensive handling of access and authorisations using a smartphone and put this concept to the test in a real-life pilot project. The Systel team concerned can look forward to an exciting time!
