In metropolitan India the major form of transport for commuters daily are the local trains, leading to long queues for the ticket and also a large percentage of ticket less traveling. We developed the working of a system by using mobile phone technology, which has inveterated urban India, as the means of a fare collection system for suburban train travel in India. The scheme helps to avoid the large percentage of ticketless traveling as well as allows commuters to book tickets while traveling for their onward journey keeping all the changes easily integrable into the currently established ticketing systems.
Our cellular fare collection system is activated by a simple SMS request sent from the user. The server issues tickets in the form of a SMS reply containing a 13 digit unique code corresponding to the journey details of the user. The position and time detection system avoids any ticketless travel. The server maintains a database of all issued tickets and their details which can be easily recovered at a later time for ticket checking.

Relevant Publications

P.Kotkar, K.Mayank, Suyog deshpande. (2008). “A Cellular Fare Collection System for Suburban Railways in India”, IEEE third International Conference on COMmunication System softWAre and MiddlewaRE (COMSWARE), Jan 2008, Bangalore, Indi(Presentation)