Automated System of Passenger Services
(ASTRA UZ ASPS)
Railway Transport

Synergetic approach in railway ticket issuing, mass electronic payments and fare collection that leads to breakthrough.

Since 1996 in tight cooperation with State enterprise Ukrzaliznytsya (Ukrainian Railways, UZ) our company develops and deploys new business processes and according IT-solutions in area of Ukraine-wide passenger services.

Ukraine has a one of the largest railway network in Europe. Annual amount of ticketing operations reaches up to hundreds of millions. Railway transport is the main mean of travel in Ukraine.

ASPS, the country-wide automated system includes four main aspects. They are commuter, long-range passenger traffic control, satellite passenger services infrastructure and wagon depot processes. Legacy business-processes and technical means assumed manual and averaging processing of ticketing operations with significant lost of valuable marketing information.

Learning and analysing cause-effect chains in the legacy business process of fare collection leading to losses we found the definite set of appliance points and designed original IT-solutions helping to take situation under control with optimal investments in IT-infrastructure of UZ.

Starting from developing and deploying the functional kernel of ASPS in 2001 we have being provided technical and technological solutions for wide range of aspects.


Now ASPS incorporates following

• National-wide ticket booking and reservation system for long-travel trains (former “Express-2” and “Express-UZ”). It is implemented (with our partners) as a centralized IBM’s mainframe-based application servicing above several thousands booking point-of-sale terminals manufactured by us through tcp/ip network of UZ (booking PoS includes our own implementation of 3270 terminal emulator using TN3270E protocol);
• National-wide automated system of commuter passenger services;
• Automated system of exploitation and maintenance management of passenger wagons and management of depot organizational activities;
• Means of payment operation processing in satellite services such as retail trading in on train board and railway stations, luggage offices automation, etc…

Most of the mentioned aspects already in intensive production use on Ukrainian Railways.


Functionally ASPS structure subdivides into:
Functional kernel:

- ticketing and cash payment operation registration subsystem, including:

• Mobile cash and e-payment operations registers (terminals);
• Stationary booking POS terminals;
• Ticket Issuing Automatic Systems;

- primary finance and statistical data collecting subsystem;

- finance and statistical data processing subsystem (reports design and generation);

- prevention of passenger travelling without a ticket subsystem, including:

• Turnstile-based access control subsystem;
• Ticket and smart-card validation and penalty registration subsystem (based on ticket inspector terminals);
• Control of ticket and smart-card validation effectiveness subsystem
• Reference data management subsystem;

- personnel account management subsystem;

Functional extensions: are numerical and implemented as additional web-services.