The migration of Ile-de-France tickets on electronic ticketing, which began in the early 2000s, has been extended to all packages of one week or more (which cover 80% of traffic):
- Full map in 2001,
- Imagine R Student in 2002 and Imagine R School in 2003,
- gradual migration of Orange cards from 2004 to 2009,
- Solidarity Transport and Free Transport packages in 2008,
- creation of the Complementary Pathway and deployment of the new Amethyst packages in 2013.
Today, only tickets, tickets and short-term packages remain on magnetic media.
In 2007, Île-de-France Mobilités (formerly STIF) chose to equip itself with a decision-making information system to use validation data. A "decision-making information system" is a system that collects large volumes of data of various kinds and then organizes them according to modeling rules allowing meaningful analyses for decision support. BI information systems are used in the mobile telephony, banking and retail sectors, among others.
The striking feature of the implementation of the validation data information system (SIDV) for Île-de-France Mobilités is the very considerable volume of data flows to be managed: there are, on a day of full traffic, about 10 million validations and around 2.5 billion validations over a year.
To find out more, you can download the note "Téléticketing: validation at the service of decision-making" (March 2010) which presents the context and essential characteristics of the SIDV, as well as some examples of the use of validation data.
The data associated with a validation and reported in the SIDV are:
- the number of the anonymised Navigo card, the category of the ticket, the period and the areas of validity of the ticket;
- the date, time and place of the validation;
- the type of validation (input – in which mode, output – from which mode, correspondence – from which mode to which mode);
- identification of the operator, the line, the vehicle, the mission;
- identification of the equipment.
The possibilities for statistical exploitation are therefore very rich. It is useful to keep the following elements in mind to properly measure its scope and limitations.
- The anonymization algorithms are renewed every quarter. The card numbers are subject to an anonymisation algorithm at the level of the carriers' information systems and then a second one at the level of the Île-de-France Mobilités information system. These algorithms are changed every quarter. Thus, it is possible to identify the successive validations associated with the same card over the duration of a calendar quarter at most; the anonymization algorithms are irreversible, it is strictly impossible to make the link between the identifier of a card as it appears in the SIDV and the original number of the card.
- The SIDV only "sees" validations. Some journeys remain invisible in the validation reports: bus journeys by people who have not validated when boarding the vehicle, or train journeys between two "open" stations made by passengers who have not validated at the start (we speak of "open" stations when you can access or leave the platforms without the need to go through a validation portal). In the absence of adjustment, the raw data from the SIDV therefore underestimates bus or tram journeys and certain train journeys in relation to the actual mobility of season ticket holders.
- The SIDV reconstructs the mobility of the maps from the validation data by applying modelling rules. During the development of the system, about thirty rules were put in place to aggregate validations into journeys, then into journeys, on the basis of average behaviours.
One of the current challenges for Île-de-France Mobilités is to improve the accuracy and precision of mobility analysis by using validation data. For this reason, special efforts are being made to work with carriers on improving the quality of data flows, but also to developing reliable straightening principles and refined modelling rules that can be used to estimate actual mobility from the use of validation data.
One of the very appreciable advantages of using validation data compared to traditional mobility surveys, or counting operations carried out by carriers, is to offer a dynamic vision: a survey or a count gives a fixed picture of mobility, the observation of validation data makes it possible to see how traffic varies according to the days and seasons according to calendar effects, weather, etc.