# Context:
Shift2Rail European initiative delivering focused Research & Innovation in the Railway industry is composed of five Innovation Programmes (IPs).
Under the IP4 scope “IT solutions for attractive Railway services”, the Travel Shopping, Booking & Ticketing topics are addressed by the on-going Co-Active project.
# Challenges:
Currently, a large number of different ticketing, payment & validation systems exist across operators & transport modes.
For the traveller, this means having to switch between multiple websites in order to book & pay for each episode of the planned journey.
Moreover, when travelling, several tickets need to be validated individually at the right moment.
Although, is currently difficult to achieve interoperability between different booking & ticketing systems at regional or even national scale. Fragmentation of ticketing Medias (different smart cards) and ticketing products (transport offers by different providers in the multimodal ecosystem) remains an important issue.
# Objectives:
The main goal of Co-Active project is to improve the previously explained situation, by:
1. Providing a smart, fast & easy door-to-door Travel Shopping solution, allowing multimodal Journey Planning & Shopping of Itineraries as well as associated ancillary services. The proposed solution will:
- Take into account the first & last miles via a ‘one-stop shop’ integrating urban, coach, rail & air transportation offers as well as personal & shared transport offers (e.g. Car Sharing, Bike Sharing & Car Park Management).
- Enrich Journey Planning functionalities by ensuring the journey re-Accommodation (re-planning).
- Refine the Offer Building with more information, alternatives, fare rules and ancillary services.
2. Providing a smart, fast & easy door-to-door Booking & Ticketing solution, allowing multimodal Travel (Fare Product) Booking, Payment (Issuing) & re-Accommodation (Cancellation or Replacement). The proposed solution will:
- Take into account the travel rights in order to manage a smart re-Accommodation of the multimodal journey.
- Allow the traveller to easily book, pay, modify & cancel a complete or an episode of the multimodal travel as well as the associated ancillary services.
- Ensure an instantaneous issuing of the appropriate dematerialised Entitlement/Token/Embodiment (e.g. Electronic or Mobile Ticket, QR Code...) which is readable by the different validation & inspection devices.
- Ensure the correct clearing & settlement for business actors.
3. Simplifying the B2B & B2C contractual management in order to ease the understanding of each actor's rights/responsibilities as well as the traveller guaranties, especially in case of disruption needing a prompt re-Accommodation. This will make the traveller more confident in reaching his destination on schedule.
# Constraints:
- Existing systems must be kept mainly unchanged (infrastructure, legacy equipment).
- Achieve interoperability through minimum standardization.
- Ensure market uptake with a near-zero cost (facilitates new comers integration).
- Horizontal scalability through distributed micro-service environments.
# Conclusions of the action for this 4th period (final period):
All tasks are in line with the Annex 1 of the DoA, amended in 2018/2019 to extend the project by five months in order handle the additional activities identified within the 3rd period and finalize the project’s full scope as described on the DoA.
The main activities, handled within this 4th period (final period), are detailed below:
- Remove temporary interfaces and shortcuts set-up for the InnoTrans2018 demonstration,
- End-to-end S2R-IP4 overall integration. Build and testing of clean interfaces for the final release and the final event,
