High-speed Processing and High Reliability in a Wired-and-Wireless Integrated Autonomous Decentralized IC Card Ticket System

To improve the processing speed of the automatic fare collection gates (AFCG) is one of the important problems to correspond to the passengers getting on and off in high-density transportation at the peak. On the other hand, reliability is indispensable to handle tickets, which are worth notes. Therefore, ticket system must have both high-speed processing and high reliability. To improve passengers' convenience and to reduce maintenance cost, wireless IC card ticket system has been hoped. However, high-speed processing and high reliability are ambivalent at this system because of wireless communications between an IC card and an AFCG; the faster the AFCG processes the ticket, the poorer the reliability gets. In this thesis, the autonomous decentralized processing technology is proposed to meet the requirements of high-speed processing and high reliability in wireless IC card ticket system. "IC cards," "AFCG" and "central server" are assumed as autonomous systems. Also, "decentralized algorithm of fare calculation by IC cards and AFCG" is proposed to achieve high-speed processing. Moreover, "autonomous decentralized consistency technology" in each subsystem is shown for high-reliability. In addition, to make them effective, "wireless communication area enhancing technology (touch & go method)" and "command system for the data high speed processing" are shown. These technologies are introduced into the Suica system of East Japan Railway Company (JR East) and the effectiveness has been proven