NFC & BLE Micro-Location Mobile Ticketing Solution
Complex Porto Public Transport System Upgraded with Mobile Ticketing Solution
The Porto metropolitan area has a new mobile ticketing solution: University of Porto researchers Marta Campos Ferreira, Teresa Galvão Dias and João Falcão e Cunha have developed a system that uses both NFC & BLE technology. All facts and figures in this article are derived from: M. C. Ferreira, T. G. Dias and J. Falcão e Cunha, (2021) "Anda: An Innovative Micro-Location Mobile Ticketing Solution Based on NFC and BLE Technologies," in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Porto’s public transport network is divided into 47 geographic travel zones. Fares are based on how many zones passengers travel through on their journey.
Porto’s existing public transport system was implemented in 2003, bringing together 19 operators of different modes of transportation. The mobile ticketing solution and application Anda resulted from the collaboration between the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) and the Intermodal Transport of Porto (TIP).
Reducing Public Transport Complexity
Porto’s public transport is arranged in an intermodal system that was implemented in 2003. The fare price depends on how many different zones passengers travel through on their journey. With this check-in-only system, passengers must know exactly through how many zones they will travel through in order to purchase the correct ticket in advance.
This requires a good knowledge of the zones and the transportation routes, making the correct ticket purchase a daunting task for anyone who is not as familiar with the system. The mobile ticketing solution was aimed to tackle these challenges.
Flexible Payment
Instead of pre-purchasing tickets before the trip, mobile ticketing enables customers to be more flexible, allowing for a more relaxed and user-friendly experience of public transport – especially for new customers.
Integrating Multiple Transport Providers
Porto’s metropolitan area public transport system consists of 19 operators, with a recorded number of 195.5 million trips in the network. The intermodal system already included all operators in a universal fare price system, but also offered a potential for greater efficiency and benefits for customers and operators that derive from the implementation of a mobile solution, which sparked the research and development process in the first place.