MSRTC Lost Ticket Recovery System

There is a trend from paper tickets and manual collection of fares to electronic, mobile, and automated fare collection. This trend made ticket purchase and validation quicker but led to emergence of new demands related to usability, security, passenger identification, and easy access to ticket data. Mobile ticketing research included such topics as user adoption, usability, payment acceptance, QR code validation, and alternative technologies like BLE. Meanwhile, the research on automated fare collection revealed that ticketing systems may provide valuable operational data besides fare collection. There is however one practical question that gets rather less coverage in the discussed literature – what to do when a passenger lost his ticket, forgot its ID or cannot use a mobile application? This review summarizes the literature related to automated fare collection, mobile ticketing, QR ticketing, electronic validation, passenger acceptance, and public transport ticketing services. On this basis, the concept of a solution that uses registered phone number of the passenger for finding their ticket and account and uses authorized conductor for assistance when required is suggested. This review covers route-based fare choice, ticket state handling, QR presentation, access rights, and security/privacy requirements. In contrast to treating mobile ticketing as just another payment issue, this paper looks at the ticket management as an end-to-end passenger service involving ticket creation, validation, retrieval, and help with using it. The literature reviewed confirms the technological feasibility of the proposed solution but also indicates the opportunity to investigate ticket retrieval and conductor access as a part of digital public bus ticketing system.