Scope of the TOMP API

Scope of the TOMP-API

In 2018 the Dutch Ministry of I&W (Infrastructure and Water management) initiated 7 MaaS pilots. As part of the agreement for facilitating these pilots, participating parties are required to cooperate in a standardization process. The goal of this standardization process is to create an ecosystem where Transport Operators and MaaS providers can interact in a standardized way. To maintain the standard an open source community was established (TOMP WG).

TOMP facilitates the MaaS ecosystem by describing how the communication can be done between the Transport Operators and MaaS Providers, but it’s not a full ecosystem. In a working ecosystem several other items are required. These are the services that are at least required:

• a discovery service to find out which TOs are operating in a certain area
• an authentication service for the parties using the ecosystem
• at least one clearing house (an independent party guaranteeing payment)

Other items could come in handy, but are not required:

• a travel right stock (to facilitate exchange of validation/access information),
• governance organizations (to control legislation)
• personal data stores

These ecosystem facilities are not yet in place, but will be there in the (near) future. The discovery service is under investigation for development now, the authentication is a needed and the TOMP parties are trying to agree on one way of authentication. In Belgium the personal data stores are under development nowadays. In other words, in the upcoming months the first contours of the ecosystem will show.

EU legislation requires its countries to implement a National Access Point, the discovery service is a part of it. Setting up other services is left to the market.