Sunday, April 11, 2010

Sydney Electronic Ticketing System Selected

According to media reports, the Pearl Consortium, made up of Downer EDI, Commonwealth Bank and Cubic Transportation Systems has won the Sydney electronic transport ticketing system. Key to the consortium is Cubic_Transportation_Systems which has provided electronic ticket systems to large city transport systems, including the Oyster Card for London Underground. Downer EDI is an engineering company (the EDI does not stand for "Electronic Data Interchange"). The Commonwealth Bank has experience with MasterCard PayPass and Visa payWave these are contactless payment cards. These and similar cards are now being distributed widely to bank customers. However, it unclear if the NSW will permit their use for travel payments.

2 comments:

  1. Tom,

    Can you please explain to me where the complexity is in the Sydney ticketing system (before MyZone), because as I understand the problem, this is simply a lookup on an N-dimensional table, where the inputs are essentially the start and finish of the journey, date, time of day, type of fare (adult/child etc.). This doesn't seem like a hard problem at all.

    Regards,

    Philu

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