VDV Core Application quickens the pace

Transport infrastructure is a key factor for economic success in every country. For a country like Germany, public transport has become even more systemrelevant than before. Why? Globalisation is becoming a European challenge for trade and transport. Germany is probably most affected, as it is Europe’s export-leading nation. While cargo companies have mostly exhausted their efficiency potentials, costs keep growing and street bottlenecks continue as infrastructure programmes can’t cope with volume growth. Individual passenger transportation is thus suffering from increasing cargo transportation volumes, and growing costs are an even heavier burden for German citizens in times of Banking and Euro crisis. Consequently, public transport passenger numbers have grown steadily in Germany for decades and is now scratching the 11 billion per year mark.

Changing environment

The increasing demand for public transport is fuelled by changing job market framework conditions. Growing distances between home and place of work, transition to flexible work places and continuing growth of metropolitan regions are the key elements of this change. In addition, the awareness of the population in terms of environmental protection has increased significantly. This change in awareness has initiated a change of mindset from ‘owning’ to ‘using’, which fuels at the urban trend from individually owned cars to smart public transport solutions.

Public transport has got a high reputation in Germany today. This is largely due to a modern, clearly designed and extensive network as well as having a simple, interoperable and intermodal ticketing system, at least within the metropolitan areas. On the other hand, most trips are made by season ticket holders which make up only 15% of the population. Up to now, the vast majority of the people i.e. 40% use public transport occasionally. Still, this amounts to 25% of all trips. Thus these occasional riders are the main target group for interoperable e-ticketing, as they do profit most from smart public transport solutions. Smart ticketing is a key component of smart public transport solutions. It comprises easy and error-proof ticket selection, convenient electronic payment and seamless ticketing for the whole travel chain. Considering the requirements of all the functions involved in the fare management process, smart ticketing means interoperable electronic ticketing.

Focus on interoperability

Interoperability became the vision for future German e-ticketing. The Association of German Transport Companies (VDV) clearly recognised this historic opportunity to create a nation wide, standardised user-friendly electronic fare management system. In 2003, it took action to develop the VDV Core Application and founded therefore the VDV Core Application Ltd. Partnership with a limited liability company as general partner. By nature, the VDV became the general partner, whereby individual public transport companies, associations and other stake holders in and around public transport make up the group of individual partners.

The mission of the application can be described as follows:

● Modular architecture to keep the entrance hurdle low and allow a local ‘best fit’ approach

● Variants to be implemented gradually and to coexist with each other

● All passengers are intended to use all national electronic fare management systems seamlessly with one type of media – this requires an integrated customer interface for each module

Independence of any pricing system i.e. allowing full local selfadministration of a fare model

● State-of-the-art security concept with regard to potentially high values stored on the system and long-term investment protection

● Using CEN and ISO standards as norm base only.

VDV Core Application speeding up (((eTicket Germany

The standard for the system was developed during 2003 to 2005, always keeping an eye on ongoing development of technology as well as on lessons learnt in electronic fare management standards like ITSO in the UK and Calypso in France. Just in time with the development work finishing in 2005, the system was piloted in four regions in Germany, pushing approximately two million contactless chip cards as customer media into the market.

In September 2009, the first nationwide results workshop took place and communicated the unanimous message: The VDV Core Application is a success story! Nobody talks about the pilot project anymore, only about implementation projects. During 2010, the number of implementations of the VDV Core Application kept growing exponentially as most of the German metropolitan areas started their implementation project. In September 2010, six big public transport associations, German Rail and the VDV Core Application signed the ‘Wiesbaden Declaration’ as a public commitment to accelerate and to strengthen the implementation of the VDV Core Application as the (((eTicket Germany. These transport associations and German Rail cover two thirds of all German public transport trips, and the declaration was officially handed to the Federal German Minister of Transport to strengthen the impact of the message conveyed.

Nationwide service and operations

At that point in time, decision making was required for the VDV Core Application. The often forecasted NFC breakthrough did not take place in Europe. No IFM-2 project was born. Instead, an urgent need for central services regarding the (((eTicket Germany came up. Users needed to communicate with each other nationwide, plus a central black list service was required.

Unanimously, the market asked the VDV Core Application to migrate from a develop – ment company to a service company in order to provide the required services companyneutral. As an indispensable attri-bute, a nationwide marketing project was launched at that time to introduce (((eTicket Germany as the German national brand of the VDV Core Application.

The VDV Core Application accepted the challenge quickly. A system was designed, which provides a simple, fast, secure, affordable and state-of-the-art communication for all public transport players. Both systems, the central communication hub as well as the black list service system, fulfil highest data protection requirements and guarantee permanent availability. The system delivers loss-free mass data transfers while allowing for central performance monitoring and exception handling. At the same time, the hub can’t read any content as all messages are securely encrypted end-to-end.

By the end of March 2011, both systems went live as the first operational units ever of (((eTicket Germany. During the summer, German Rail, a number of transport associations and manufacturers served as friendly users to confirm the systems are fit for purpose.

However, as the requirements were set up in 2010, the new central systems needed to take care of the implementation projects already operating at that time. Those implementation projects were set up according to the VDV Core Application standards, but could not foresee some decisions which came up only when the specifications for the central systems were defined. While the systems version 1.0 was proven to be fit for purpose, system extensions were developed in a gateway style to also host the already existing systems as well while ensuring the VDV standard compatibility at the central system’s boundaries. These extensions are incorporated in systems version 2.0, which went into production in October 2011.

Flagship projects Germany

At that point in time, Berlin, Hamburg and a central south-west Germany hub bundling the smaller Baden-Wuerttemberg transport associations are connecting themselves to the central (((eTicket Germany systems.

Berlin and Hamburg cover more than five million people. The next one to join is already on the horizon. It is the Rhein-Ruhr metropolitan area plus Dusseldorf and Cologne. Taking the population of all these before mentioned regions into account, the total coverage is approximately 20 million people.

Next steps

E-Mobility is a hot term in Germany at the moment. This term tries to embrace all types of mobility replacing conventional fuel by electric power. However, in public perception this term is very often restricted to the development of hybrid and electricity powered cars. In order to foster multimodal travelling and to use the full potential of the VDV Core Application, the city of Stuttgart plans to designs its eTicket project as a multi-purpose and multi-application project. This project is designed to cover public transport, Daimler-Benz’ Car2Go and urban features.

Similar discussions have been taken up with Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW), to probably use the car key as a ticket holder for long-haul travel.

The (((eTicket Germany has come a long way, but significant progress has been made in the last two years. There is still some distance to go towards full German coverage, but VDV Core Application has already quickened the pace. The (((eTicket Germany is ready to continue both for the passengers and for the transport companies.

About the authors

Drs. Ing. J. (Sjef) A.L. Janssen is Managing Director of VDV Core Application. During his prior career in public transport of the Netherlands, he was a management member of a large Dutch transport company and also worked for the Dutch association of public transport in chip card development.

Hartmut Loerch is Head of IT Management of VDV Core Application, the issuer of the German e-ticket standard. During his previous career at leading international banks, he headed up European consumer product manage ment and programme management. He has led international IT projects such as Euro conversion and platform implementations.