Leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology for Decentralized Mobility-as-a-Service Ticket Systems

Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a concept for combining different transport modes, including diverse mobility services, while facilitating their use through customer centricity (e.g., pay-as-you-go tariffs, unified interfaces). MaaS platforms offer access to different mobility services of various providers via MaaS ticket systems. IT governance of current ticket systems is largely assigned to central organizations that guide decisions on the ticket system design, modalities, and the participation of mobility providers. Mobility providers depend on decisions of system providers, which can cause discrimination of competitors in MaaS ticket systems and limit flexibility for customers. By distributing decision rights to multiple mobility providers, IT governance for MaaS ticket systems can be decentralized so that dependencies on single providers are reduced.

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) can be suitable to technically support such decentralization. However, DLT causes new challenges (e.g., regarding confidentiality, cost, latency, and maintainability), which question the viable use of DLT in real-world deployments of MaaS ticket systems. ... mehrWe present a preliminary sociotechnical model of a decentralized ticket system, point out technical challenges for using DLT in decentralized ticket systems based on common requirements for MaaS platforms, and describe exemplary solutions to address these challenges. Thereby, we contribute to a better understanding about the viable use of DLT in MaaS ticket systems. Our results indicate that the use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) is especially promising to increase performance and confidentiality. We outline future research directions regarding the applicability of TEEs in real-world MaaS ticket systems.