Towards a Mobility Payment Service Based on Collaborative Open Systems

There is a need for a new strategy and approach to effectively develop mobility services in Europe. These services should be seen by customers as integrated services which are offered by a payment service provider using direct debit payments as established by the European Central Bank. The mobility service would enable a citizen to use multimodal transportation means including public transportation, tolling, parking lots, bicycle rental, etc. in Europe under a single contract. Competing mobility service providers need to be trusted and supervised by authorities based on digital supervision and auditing processes. Digital platforms need to smoothly deal with heterogeneous infrastructures of the different operators which validate utilizations using a variety of means such as card, mobile phone, or automatic vehicle identification systems. All transportation-related events need to be reliably communicated to the payment service providers. Detected failures need a clear and easy to follow resolution procedure. The variety of existing technologies and methodologies to develop informatics systems and processes automation make it difficult to reach such objectives and also an obstacle for authorities to effectively supervise the processes. An open system of systems framework approach combined with a collaborative network support infrastructure to facilitate information exchange and coordination among all involved stakeholders is proposed as a promising way to address these challenges. This paper further develops previous research in this area, better clarifying the challenges, and recommending a development strategy which has been proved in a number of partial implementations.