Roma Pass Service

Client: ATAC S.p.A.	Field: Ticketing
Location: Rome	Country: Italia
Sectors: Local Public Transport and Mobility	Release Dater: 1st February 2010
Product: Not applicable	Partner:

Figures.

• Entrance to 52 Museums;
• 8 Multimedia Totems;
• 163.320 Roma Pass entries managed from February 1st to April 18th 2010;
• A peak of 26.465 entries managed from April 1st to 7th 2010 (Easter period)
• 69.195 sold Roma Pass cards (+70%).

Description.

During May 2009, fabbricadigitale has been involved in a study by ATAC in order to verify the possibility to implement, on an all-in-one “contact-less” card, the Metrebus Card, the functions of transport and access control for cultural events and tourism.
fabbricadigitale proposed its own SaaS solution, which had been originally tested on a pilot project (the summer festival entitled “Notti di Cinema a Piazza Vittorio”, organized by ANEC Lazio).
The pilot project has been later extended to the project for the implementation of a new high availability platform, based on the requirements of the new “nuova Roma Pass” born from the collaboration between ATAC and Zetema (Rome City Council’s company which manages the Civic Museums and promotes the cultural tourism in Rome), and able to manage different initiatives at the same time.

The challenge.

Implement an access control system using the ATAC transport cards for different cultural and/or tourist initiatives, which will replace any existing systems (the former Roma Pass system had been operative for more than 4 years but it didn’t use the ATAC contactless cards and so it forced tourists to use two different cards).

The solution.

1. A SaaS high-availability platform able to manage different initiatives;
2. Web-based applications for the control and sale on over 50 terminals of the customer, equipped with RFID HF readers able to read the contactless cards of public transport;
3. Integration with the existing turnstiles through 8 Multimedia Totems equipped with RFID HF readers;
4. Web-based application for reporting and configuration, with different access permissions for museums, museum managers, security services, Zetema and ATAC.

The result.

The platform of the RomaPass system (the only one which is running at the moment) is appreciated especially for the following reasons:

1. The times for card reading are satisfactory and shorter than the previous non-web solution (on average, less than a second);
2. The ticket terminals don’t require software installations and are always updated (the solutions provided are web-based);
3. The user experience is good, the Silverlight based user interface is easy to be used and the layout is enjoyable;
4. The reporting is effective and easy to use, the Silverlight based reporting site makes available also the data mining in local in .csv format for off-line processing;
5. The operational availability is very high despite occasional problems of connectivity of single sites;
6. The figures show very well the Success of the solution for Zetema and ATAC.