Beep4Me: automatic ticket validation to support fare clearing and service planning

An integrated transport service fare system, supported by an agreement for ticket revenue sharing among service providers, is an essential component to improve the experience of the users who can find single tickets for the integrated transport services they look for. A challenge is to find a model to share the revenue which all providers agree on. A solution is to adopt data-driven approaches where user-generated data are collected to extract information on the extent each transport service was used. This is consistently used. However, it suffers from incomplete data, as not all users always validate their ticket when checking out or when switching lines. We studied all technologies available to support automatic ticket validation in order to record when the users access and exit each service line. The contributions of this work are the following: we give an in-depth description of the inner workings of this novel approach describing how we take advantage of each technology; we present the developed solution (Beep4Me), which adds new functionalities to an existing mobile ticketing platform; and we describe our testing framework, which includes most cases users might encounter during a trip. Our results demonstrate how it is possible to collect key data related to validations which can be used first for clearing purposes and then for network planning/fleet optimization.