Seamless ticketing SDK

Fábio Rafael Gaudino Caetano Pereira Pimenta

Key information

Authors:

Fábio Rafael Gaudino Caetano Pereira Pimenta (Fábio Rafael Gaudino Caetano Pereira Pimenta)

Supervisors:

Alberto Manuel Ramos da Cunha (Alberto Manuel Ramos da Cunha)

Published in

11/18/2021

Abstract

The current ticket technologies used in public transportation revolve around smart cards. These smart cards are widely used but have some inherent faults associated such as easily being transferable between users, only being rechargeable in specific physical locations, and being required to be printed, making them not environmentally friendly. Hence, it is essential to develop an alternative. With smartphones being more prevalent then ever, it seems fitting to extend their functionalities to replace the usage of smart cards. In this thesis, the Seamless SDK was developed alongside Card4B Systems, the Seamless SDK was designed to provide functionalities such as trip management and ticket validation to applications that integrate the SDK, using technologies like Bluetooth Low Energy for tracking the user inside the transport, which is crucial for the trip management, and QR code for acquiring the necessary information for the validation. The Seamless SDK was developed in a cross-platform framework to be integrated into applications in the two main mobile platforms, iOS, and Android. To guide the development and evaluate the Seamless SDK, two mobile applications were developed, one in Android and another in the iOS platform, giving us great insight into how to integrate the Seamless SDK in different applications and platforms while providing a way to test and evaluate the functionalities of the SDK. Furthermore, it was evaluated the usefulness of the cross-platform framework in the development of our solution.