Sharing is caring: redefining the smart ticket to facilitate technical innovation within smart ticketing infrastructures

This paper proposes the Smart Ticket Categorisation Framework, a novel framework for defining and labelling smart ticket implementations. The framework categorises smart tickets into one of three tiers, which identifies them as either: digital, whereby the tickets are stored in a digital format; digital and accessible, whereby the tickets are stored digitally and are accessible across multiple devices and organisations; or digital, accessible, and prognostic, whereby the smart tickets enable smarter data-driven decisions to benefit passengers and the wider transport network. By using our framework, we challenge the traditional definition of a smart ticket (which generally defines a smart ticket as a ticket that is stored in a digital format) and instead focus on the capability of the ticket. By categorising existing smart ticket implementations in Great Britain, we establish that many smart tickets are simple tickets that are categorised by our framework as digital. From these observations, we challenge the industry to move to an infrastructure of digital, accessible, and prognostic smart tickets, and present a potential solution to achieve this in the form of the System for Ticketing Ubiquity with Blockchains. This solution uses distributed ledger technology as a mechanism to facilitate a more intelligent smart ticketing infrastructure that stores tickets as non-fungible tokens.