The project was extended with 12 months to April 2018.
In the first months we worked on further detailing the project and its project management. The europeantravellersclub.eu website was launched, which is used to explain the ETC and publish relevant documentation and specifications. Besides this website, we have promoted our project at several international conferences and will continue to do that via the e-TSAP association (e.tsap.net).
With the partners in the consortium and interested stakeholders we have worked on the governance principles and set-up of the ETC as a separate entity. This entity was formally set-up, with its own statutes, business plan and governance and is called Accept Institute (acceptinstitute.eu). Accept is the entity that will be used to further exploit the results of the ETC project and has 6 members in their advisory board: Rejsekort A/S from Denmark, ITSO Ltd. from the UK, Transport Scotland, Translink from the Netherlands, NTA from Ireland and Verkéiersverbond from Luxembourg.
The ETC-Lab acts as a demonstration and testing facility for our program. We have tested the central authentication and routing hub, account-systems, front-end equipment, mobile apps etc. and use cases for all pilots and invited several stakeholders to the Lab in order to demonstrate the ETC concept.
The central authentication and routing hub (EcoSpace Core) and its interfaces were developed by Accept. The interoperable ID, the Generic Secure Token, used as an identifier and connected to the account of traveller was designed and implemented. It can reside as a side-token on existing chip cards and/or other form factors.
We executed 3 pilots in our project: the pilot in Luxembourg focusses on the multi-application aspects of the Account-Based traveling concept, while the 2 pilots in The Netherlands and Germany focus on cross-border travelling. For all three pilots the ETC software and interfaces, both for the front-end equipment as for the back-office systems, has been implemented in a real-life environment with the existing suppliers (eg. INIT, Scheidt&Bachmann, IVU, Systemtechnic). The front-end equipment has been connected to the EcoSpace Core. Next to that all travellers (approximately 500 in total) have been issued smartcards, produced by existing card suppliers with the existing transport application and the GST token (a special developed token within the ETC program) and smartphone apps to view their transactions.