ITxPT Association General Assembly – Recap

The ITxPT Associations General Assembly took place in Gothenburg, Sweden on 16 June 2022. An Assembly is held every June and December, and this was the first in person assembly since Covid-19. Our Industry Solutions Manager, David Panter attended the assembly virtually and prepared the following two-page summary to give you a quick insight into what is happening in the ITxPT world.

The initial part of the assembly is a procedural meeting where the ITxPT group show their annual accounts and receive validation of their activities from the strategic and principal members.

A set of presentation slides is available on the ITxPT members documentation area (free to sign up).

We heard that:

• • ITxPT now has 161 members and is growing quickly.
  • Additional test engineers and interns have been brought on to assist with the testing
  • The budget performed better than expected due to increased membership and additional labelling work.

The General assembly was followed by a Membersmembers meeting that outlined progress and the future directions of ITxPT.

1. There is a lot happening with in the area of ITxPT standards development. Some of the key learnings from this session were:

2. Pre-studies help decide where to focus ITxPT and are being finalised for intermodal ticketing. This will probably start off small, with communication protocols between the on-board validators and the back office, seen as a quick win.

Specification release 2.2 (as promised) was released early July. This has:

• • Enhancements to the APC specification to make it a data centric specification based on MQTT and better able to handle multi door areas like in trams and trains, Updates to the FMStoIP services,
  • A means to capture needed required Electric Vehicle data that is not in the FMS scope,
  • GNSS location support for multi constellations,
  • AVMS multilingual support, and
  • TiGR protocol clarifications and support for EV data

3. Future development of specifications for heavy rail is underway. Of note here are:

• • VtoIP for monitoring and maintenance data,
  • Coupling/decoupling data,
  • Virtualiszation (plug and play systems),
  • Cybersecurity

4. Also on the horizon are specifications for:

• • Demand responsive transport,
  • Traffic light priority,
  • Passenger safety,
  • Software OTA, and
  • Communications channel reporting

5. An awareness program is being looked at to assist Public Transport Authorities (PTA) understand what ITxPT is and how this can be used. There are many PTA on board but also a lot of others who are not fully aware of the benefits they can gain by specifying ITxPT in their tenders.

6. There are several projects underway involving ITxPT. One, is the DATA4PT validation tool with has the mission to support the European standards of Transmodel, SIRI, and NeTEx for public tTransport data in National Access Points. This validates the data sets to enable the interoperable exchange of travel and traffic data. For more information see https://github.com/ITxPT/DATA4PTTools

7. The test lab is busy with 4-5 labelling processes running in parallel. 75% of the API testing is now fully automatic.

8. The catalogue has been updated to better reflect consumers and producers of services.

9. It has been noticed that some suppliers are not ITxPT members but claim to have ITxPT compatible products. The ITxPT laboratory will independently validate compliance to the standards and certify this with formal labelling. They work with member companies to modify and enhance products so that they can be certified and so that end users will not have integration issues. Often certification requires work by the member companies to fully meet the ITxPT standard. ITxPT will discuss membership options with these companies. As the ITxPT label is a way to have confidence in the interfaces, Authorities PTA should specify ITxPT labels for all proposed products.

For more information on any of these topics contact David at [email protected] or give him a call on +61 414 779 020.  These are exciting times where ITxPT is rapidly gaining traction as the Public Transport interface specification of the future.