M-Ticketing System using QR Codes for Mumbai Local

Abstract

The Mumbai Suburban Railway serves up to 7.5 million commuters every day. It is a challenging task to provide a convenient and smooth ticketing experience to the commuters. The Mumbai Suburban railway uses the Proof-of-Payment fare collection system. Commuters have to stand in long queues to purchase a ticket. This causes inconvenience to the commuters. Many a times, to avoid such long queues and save time or if passengers are running late, they opt for going ticketless. The ticket checkers also have to manually check the commuters' ticket which requires them to manually analyze every ticket for validation. To serve so many people there was a need to have an alternate option other than manual purchasing. Therefore, an app called UTSOnMobile was released for online ticket booking. However, the app proved to be inconvenient to the commuters and was criticized due to the tedious payment process, and other limitations like tedious registration process, inability to book tickets at the platform and outside the predetermined range, inability to download eticket offline etc.Thus, to provide an agile and smooth ticketing experience to the commuters as well as to overcome the limitations of the existing app, a mobile application is proposed in this paper which will have an easy registration following which the users can book tickets from anywhere and can be linked to a free payment gateway like Paytm instead of using the concept of a RWallet. The ticket will be in the form of a QR code containing the details of the journey. This ticket can be downloaded offline. The ticket checker can easily check the validity of a ticket by scanning the QR code using just a mobile phone with a scanning application. This will thus provide an easier and better experience to both, the commuters as well as the railway authorities. The proposal in this paper will show how this system can be executed and will benefit everyone with the help of the research and survey.

A Mobile E-Ticket Framework for Bus Commuters: A Mauritian Case Study

“…QR codes can be used to store text, video, advertisement, personal information, URL, business card information or any type of digital information. As mobile technologies are booming, QR codes are being used for various purposes such as for accessing information on the web, for discount coupons, for interacting with social media, for mobile marketing, smart labelling (Ramalho, et al, 2018), for tickets (Kadge, et al, 2017), and for enhancing government service (Lorenzi, et al, 2014), amongst others. NFC is an alternative for contactless interaction (validation of tickets), however it may not be available on all smart phones.…”