ITSO and Interoperable Fare Management

Smartcards provide a significant number of benefits both to the card holder and for the background processes involved. Fraud, in particular, is a threat that is significantly reduced as smartcards are almost impossible to copy, whilst cards that are lost or stolen can easily be identified and removed permanently from the system, the result of which is that they are of no use to anyone once they have been deactivated. Smartcards can significantly reduce boarding times, particularly when combined with card-readable Point of Service Terminals (POSTs), subsequently reducing driver workload, journey times and removing a potential monetary transaction element from travel.

Scheme Operators benefit from the wealth of information that is readily available to them. Fully smart ticketing schemes can provide more data on journeys taken with greater accuracy; this can assist in the reimbursement arrangements with operators to ensure that all payments can be fairly administered. Travel information can also be shared with operators to identify patterns of travel that can lead to improvements in vehicle deployment. For operating companies who in the past have spent large amounts on surveys to establish travel patterns for their services, this readily available information can reduce or even remove the need for such surveys and hence reduce annual operator expenditure.

These benefits are easily accessed where the smartcard operates within a single ‘closed’ system. The benefits are harder to realise when two or more independent schemes operate alongside each other and mutually accept each other’s smartcards. This is when Interoperable Fare Management becomes necessary.

Interoperable ubiquity

Formed in 1998 and originally called the Integrated Transport Smartcard Organisation (ITSO), ITSO Limited is a non-profit sharing or distributing organisation, whose members include bus and train operators, industry suppliers, and national, regional and local authorities. Its objective is to facilitate the development, operation and management of an interoperable smart media environment. Issued at Version 2.1 in March 2004, the ITSO Specification is now at Version 2.1.3 (as of April 2008); this is UK Crown Copyright and available free of charge to all from the ITSO website at www.itso.org.uk.

The ITSO ‘shell’ or ‘application’ on a smartcard (akin to the ‘My Documents’ folder on a PC) provides the opportunity for a smartcard to store multiple products, meaning that an ITSO ‘card’ can be compliant with other schemes such as library or identification cards, even banking or e-money, as well as holding a variety of tickets from multiple independent transport operators. ITSO embraces a multitude of existing smart card platforms, which vary in terms of their suitability for specific schemes. These currently include NXP Mifare® Classic, DESfire and Ultralite families; Calypso; Innovision Jewel; and generic microprocessor based smart media cards such as the JCOP. These examples of customer media or cards all have contactless interfaces, a necessity in the transport sector as they are quicker and easier to operate than their contact counterparts, and more reliable in ‘dirty’ or outdoor environments. The ITSO specification has another significant advantage for the cardholder: its compatibility with other types of services such as library or leisure services means that a single smartcard can be used in a variety of situations.

ITSO Secure Application Module

Through a SIM-card sized ITSO Secure Application Module (ISAM), the ITSO specification provides a wealth of functions, such as secure key distribution and storage for product management and usage, enabling the issuing and acceptance of products from a [potentially large] number of providers and retailers, validation of media and transaction data using a high level of encryption, secure data storage and a “lossless” environment where all data transactions reach their intended recipient without being lost or tampered with (or at least it is obvious if an attempt to tamper has been made).

ITSO implementations

With approximately 300 UK Travel Concession Authorities having issued travel smartcards over 2007 and 2008 containing ITSO compliant concessionary entitlements, nearly 10 million ITSO smartcards are now in use. By adopting ITSO to provide the common and proven technical specification behind the nationwide scheme, ITSO is providing a platform for other products to be used from the same smartcard.

The introduction of separate concessionary bus travel schemes throughout England, Wales and Scotland, has given specified groups of people discounted or free travel across their respective countries. In 2000, a statutory half-fare minimum concession was introduced for pensioners and the disabled. In 2006, the statutory minimum for England was extended to full free local travel in the eligible persons area. (At this time separate schemes for Scotland and Wales with different entitlement rules were also implemented in their respective countries.) From April 2008, this was further extended and enabled those over the age of 60 and disabled people in England to get free off-peak travel on local buses anywhere in England. One major advantage of the use of the ITSO Specification in all three, currently separate, national schemes, is that there remains the potential for interoperability and indeed re-integration into one single scheme for Great Britain should the need arise in the future. At the opposite extreme, the flexibility of the Specification allows Travel Concession Authorities to provide additional local enhancements, such as ferry or metro travel or extensions of time or mode on an individual basis whilst still retaining and staying consistent with the overall nationally based requirements. This provides the traveller with a single instrument giving access to local and national entitlement as well as providing the capacity for purchasing other ITSO travel products onto the same smartcard.

Operating within a single specification allows Authorities to freely procure all the services required in order to issue smartcards for concessionary travel whilst still being assured that their local systems will allow access nationwide. This covers aspects such as card production services, card management services (CMS), back office provision (known as the Host Operator Processing System – HOPS) and in-house smartcard personalisation equipment.

With such a demand for smartcards over such a short period of time between August 2007 and April 2008, the mass production of ITSO entitlement passes scaled new heights. With over 5.7 million cards created for the English rollout by the 1 April 2008 alone, the pressure was on to ensure that data was processed quickly and accurately. During peak periods, some 800,000 data frames were being processed per day, equating to approximately 100,000 smartcards being personalised and made ready for issue each day. Over 50 different card supply options have now been certified by ITSO covering all of the defined smart card platforms and this has encouraged both the ability to match the right smartcard to the specific local needs and procure it at a competitive price.

The UK National Concession Schemes are now all more mature. At the time of writing this article, approximately 7.1 million passes have been issued to English eligible concessionaries. In Scotland, the figure stands at approximately 1.4 million, whilst in Wales the figure is around 0.5million. The coming months will reveal the potential impact smartcards can have on the evolution of public transport smart ticketing. The UK Department for Transport has also mandated ITSO smartcards across the rail network with half the rail franchises due to go ITSO within the next two to five years, and upwards of half the rail transactions (up to two billion per year) anticipated to be carried out using ITSO enabled smart media by 2015. The first rail franchise is scheduled to ‘hit the streets’ with ITSO smart ticketing in January 2009, whereupon there will commence a steady rollout as franchise commitments are implemented over the coming years.

London, with its current proprietary Oyster smartcard scheme is due to become ITSO compatible sometime in 2010, whereupon it will be able to ‘read’ both rail issued ITSO smart customer media, and all the English Concessionary ITSO smart concession passes all of which are valid for free travel on all London buses. ITSO and Oyster dual reader capability and compatibility will be applied to all points of service across ‘Oysterland’ enabling London to join in with the national ITSO environment and the benefits this brings to its users.

With these implementations now in hand, ITSO can now be considered as fully operational and interoperable across the UK, covering multi modal travel by bus, rail, tram and ferry and any modes in between!

Advantages of Interoperable Fare Management across Europe

As we have seen, smartcards have been around for a number of years, not least in the transport world and have been highly successful in schemes such as Navigo® in Paris and Oyster® in London. But interoperability – the ability to take your smartcard from one scheme and use it in another – remains an unfulfilled dream and customers need incompatible and different cards or tickets when moving from one transport system to another. Across an area such as the European Community this can be a daunting task for the passenger. Some progress has been made in writing national specifications for IFM: ITSO in the UK (described above), VdV-KA in Germany and Translink in Holland, but even though they all meet the same International and European standards, they are still not interoperable across borders.

There is an expectation that IFM will significantly lower the barriers to mobility, and encourage social inclusion, particularly amongst migrant workers or extended families. Smartcards can also be expected to encourage the use of public rather than private transport, contributing to a reduction of carbon emissions and the reduction or elimination of paper tickets and the environmental impact they create. IFM can be expected to further enhance the impact of smart media on the environment and on the efficiency of public transport. Interoperable smartcards will make it possible to tailor the media to assist specific groups such as existing concessionary travellers, disabled passengers, benefit recipients or part-time or migrant workers as well as delivering overall improvements to the customer experience and reducing barriers to switching modes.

European Interoperable Fare Management Proposals

Within Europe, the European Commission has opened its 7th five-year multi-billion Euro framework for funding projects running from 2008. These funding programmes have run since 1984 and normally cover a five year period, although this one will run for seven years. DGINFSO, the European Commission Directorate covering information and society is funding a range of major projects under the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) umbrella focussed particularly on safety, mobility and social inclusion. Public Transport is seen as having an increasing role to play in this arena, not least because of its contribution in helping to address the major issue of global warming.

Two years ago, the French, German and UK based national interoperable transport organisations, who with many others across the world had been working together to write the International Standard on IFM (ISO EN 24014), came together to propose a project to the European Commission relating to IFM. The three organisations, supported by a number of other EU countries and academic institutions, wanted to progress the recently published ISO standard on IFM into real cross-border smartcard operations for transport. Informal approaches to both the Transport and Information Directorates in Brussels were very positive and the proposal was successful at the very first round of funding towards the end of 2007 despite heavy competition for limited funds. The EU-IFM Project began operating from 1 January 2008. At a practical level the participants asked John Verity of ITSO to act as co-ordinator and prime contact with the European Commission. There are individual work packages in the project managed by ITSO/University of Newcastle (UK); SNCF/RATP/URBA/University of Paris X (France); VdV (Germany); and UITP, the international association for Public Transport based in Brussels but with membership across the world.

EU-IFM Project

This European project has the primary aim to make public transport more user-friendly by facilitating seamless accessibility to different public transport networks across Europe using smartcards. By 2015, we can expect that the payment processes shall no longer be a barrier for the users of public transport. The objective of the EU-IFM Project is to therefore provide travellers with common styles of contact-less media throughout Europe which can be used for loading multiple transport products in different geographic areas. They can also be seen as potentially and successfully encouraging sustainable modal switching, such as the use of ‘Park and Ride’ – unlike existing closed smartcard schemes which are restricted to specific city or regional geographies or operators.

The EU-IFM Project is based on delivering a wide ranging ITS based environment, not just the smart media that supports these nomadic passengers. There will be five main work packages in the Project that cover trust modelling, privacy modelling, common applications and interoperable media, a standard model for IFM organisations, and the necessary supporting back office ITS interfaces. It is being managed by the co-ordinator with assistance from TUV Rheinland. Externally facing, the UITP will ensure effective and efficient consensus and dissemination of best practice among all stakeholders, particularly transport operators who are already involved in smartcard ticketing, or those with interests in interoperability, modal switching and supporting ever changing and ever more mobile populations.

It is all of the participants’ intention to link existing European expertise with other leading IFM schemes across the world to provide leadership in this segment and to deliver results which can be transferred to areas outside of the transportation sector and to as wide a world-wide market as possible. In particular, the project is expected to allow manufacturers and suppliers to offer the end-to-end, lossless nature of IFM, the platform and transactions in other fields such as leisure, event management and social services, thereby reducing time to market and lowering the cost of implementing other comparable and compatible schemes.

The key deliverables of the project over the next two years are a formal Road Map towards EU-wide implementation of Interoperable Fare Management, together with a tool set for national transport authorities to use when building Fare and Distribution agreements including how their back offices will interact. Trust and Privacy will be key to gaining customer and operator acceptance alike, as will the availability and acceptability of suitable media of the widest possible range. This is all expected to deliver material cost benefits over and above the benefits to Mobility and Social Inclusion. A web site has been set up for the EU-IFM Project www.ifm-project.eu, and will be used to disseminate the findings of the Project.

The EU-IFM Project is in its first two-year phase. Further discussions are already underway with the European Commission for additional funding covering the formation of an EU-wide IFM organisation, which will facilitate the ability to support cross border security systems, including the security keys that are used to verify both transactions (or at least their source in relation to the IFM itself) and media. Actual pilots will be necessary to prove the concept and gain widespread support. As already suggested, the work on interoperability in public transport is likely to prove of value in other sectors such as Road Tolling and the ability to encourage modal switching to public transport.

UITP IFM Forum and international co-operation in IFM

An EU-IFM Forum has been set up by the UITP to support the EU-IFM Project, with membership extended to all EU Transport Operators and other players; further UITP sponsored IFM-Forums may follow elsewhere across the globe as other areas embrace cross border interoperability of smartcards for transport use. Such IFM-Forum is expected to encourage the appropriate level of discussion towards consensus building and the sharing of Best Practice. The UITP has already issued a Focus Paper entitled “Everybody Local Everywhere – Electronic Ticketing Interoperability and Fare Management Cooperation” and the EU-IFM Forum has now already held two successful meetings. As Manfred Novy, its Austrian Chairman said; “this Forum will ensure effective and efficient consensus and dissemination across ALL stakeholders.” Launch support came from Germany, France, UK, Holland, Finland, Belgium, Italy and Hungary and the number of countries involved has grown substantially since then. The EU-IFM Forum may be found at www.ifm-forum.eu.

The EU-IFM Project and the EU-IFM Forum are expected to push these new technology boundaries whilst jumping over other geographic ones that work against open accessible public transport. The vision is not a single ticket that covers all modes of transport and takes the customer across country borders. But there is a major prize to be gained if a customer can use the one smart media to buy and hold a range of tickets. This can be achieved with recognition for the benefits of IFM and smartcard ticketing as a deliverable in mobility, social inclusion agendas and as a contributor to reducing barriers to modal switching. ITSO and others are already delivering IFM solutions at the national level; the EU-IFM Project aims to raise the game and deliver IFM on a pan-European basis.

New developments

Proof, if any were needed that this is a vibrant and evolving industry, are the new developments in hand or now being considered. These range from new technological developments to those that are finding new ways to implement or integrate existing technologies.

NFC has potential to be used in a number of ways within transportation. As a simple extension to the Smart media that can be used to hold transport tickets, with the additional benefit to the consumer that an electronic ‘ticket’ can be visually checked both on loading and subsequently on usage without the need to take the media to another reader device. This can then be further extended to enable one device to read another, with the potential for simple and effective revenue protection devices and hand-held verifiers. The further potential for ‘over the air’ transfer of tickets from the sales location directly to the users device is also compelling and provides additional potential for the linkage of mobile telephony and NFC devices together. Keeping the customer message simple may actually be the challenge here rather than the possibilities of the technology. We should take care to ensure that, as an industry, we remember that this is all about allowing the customer to have more control over the when, the where, and the how of travel purchase.

The future for e-money and small value payments is another area where developments in another sector of ‘industry’ may have an impact on how we do things. There is a lot of discussion currently about how contactless banking (EMV) can be used to improve the payment capacity of individuals for small purchases. This won’t be a replacement for high value long distance ticketing, but could be utilised in closed metro environments where low values are the norm. The next phase may be for bank ‘cards’ to hold an extensible data area that can enable existing transport specific applications to be used, such as ITSO, to hold the higher value tickets – again the goal must be to provide the user with a single instrument for making seamless journeys from one point to another through multiple IFM systems.