General information

The Norwegian public transport sector has recently been re-aligning to facilitate next-generation dynamic services. As part of this initiative, the Norwegian State Railways has been reorganized and the majority of its system portfolio migrated to a modernized architecture, ensuring a scalable and maintainable platform. This to facilitate innovation, rapid change and shorter time to marked in order to keep the public transport solutions both customer centric and constantly improved. Which in turn will ensure better availability of public transport, simpler use and increased popularity of such services.

Architecture

Per 2018, compliant projects in Norway support elements from Part 1 to 6 of Transmodel, as described in further detail below:

National Journey Planner

The Norwegian National Journey Planner project has implemented support for NeTEx parts 1 and 2 for its Stop Place and Network/Timetable data hubs, and SIRI (numerous parts) for its real-time proxy handling Estimated Timetable, Situation Exchange and Vehicle Monitoring feeds. Support for NeTEx part 3 is partially implemented, with ticket sales for travel by railway and within the greater Oslo region provided within the Journey Planer smartphone apps.

Most backend systems are implemented using open source tools:

Furthermore, data and service APIs are publicly available and free to use by third parties at no charge.

Additionally, there is a Norwegian initiative to align and “translate” the APIs and graph search services of source projects Open Street Map (OSM) and its corresponding Open Trip Planner (OTP) to Transmodel based terms. This is both done as a supplement to shift its current GTFS centric implementation towards richer Transmodel data structures, in order to ensure that upcoming features can be supported, as well as ensuring that readily available Norwegian services for stop places management and travel information management/queries will be standard compliant.

Products and Travel Rights

As a proof of concept, the current Railway Price and Product backend system is being migrated to a Transmodel oriented model, with relevant data for price and product implemented as NeTEx Fare type objects. The project goal is to ensure that most of the related architecture, data structures, information exchange and system implementations align to Transmodel topology and its NeTEx implementation (e.g. ticketing and booking systems, national data hubs, public and private APIs etc.)

The future ambition is to fully support NeTEx part 3 in flexible combinations of dynamic price elements, i.e. pricing and its parameters within different levels the product model level, to ensure all necessary fare related information – including sales packages and access/travel rights – can be collected and distributed through this format for all modes of transport in Norway.

Next Generation Ticketing

Currently, standardized travel cards (and additional paper and mobile ticketing QR codes for some fare domains) are the interoperable ticketing platform for all counties in Norway. Implementing a common Travel Rights Storage in the National Order Database (NOD), a Transmodel based National cloud-based storage for account information and tickets / travel agreements will however facilitate the migration to account based ticketing as the mandatory interoperable platform.

Initially, this service will support pre-purchased tickets. In later iterations, the objective is to enable automatic purchases as well as fare aggregation and capping for both local and multi-region/operator journeys. Eventually, the aim will be to provide pay-as-you-go by use of positioning and/or beacon-based check-in/check-out sensors with on-the-fly fare calculation and payment.

Entur will also provide APIs to enable third party vendors to sell nationwide seamless travels.

Website: Entur AS

Target users

  • Government
  • Public transport authorities (PTAs)
  • Public transport operators (PTOs)
  • Passengers

Implementation scope

All modes of public transport in Norway

Functionalities

Elements from Transmodel currently implemented:

  • Stops / Points of Interest (incl. equipment/facilities and geo-location)
  • Network
  • Timetable
  • Fares (partial)
  • Vehicle scheduling (partial)

Usage

Norwegian National Journey Planner (with ticketing) www.en-tur.no