Building Open and Yet Secure Interoperable Fare Management Systems

Most of the fare collection projects are now multi-operator projects that aim to implement interoperable farecards at a regional or national scale. Standardization of the contactless smart cards started in the mid 90’s in ISO and led to ISO14443 standard. In 2000, a few national standardization bodies in Europe and the CEN started to work on a standard architecture to ensure interoperability between Fare Management Systems. In 2002, in US, APTA established UTFS (Universal Transit Farecards Standards) in order to provide overall guidance to the transportation community to address the many facets of business and technical interfaces that come into play as individual transit agencies pursue options for coordinating revenue collection systems into a regional transportation payments system. Thales has been participating to all these efforts. Nonetheless, if standards are necessary for interoperability, they are not implementation specifications: the achievement of multi-operator fare collection systems brings all kinds of issues on the table and call for technical and organizational solutions, especially the business model and operational model between partners. This is what this paper illustrates, using more particularly our field experience in the Netherlands, Oslo region and Denmark and in-depth work performed during the bid process in Sweden and Melbourne.