武汉理工大学 本科生毕业设计 (中英文翻译) 学院(系): 信息工程学院 专业班级: 信息0703 学生姓名: 指导教师: Electronic tickets Jun 5th 2008 From The Economist print edition IT WILL not be long before paper tickets for a plane, train or bus seem as quaint as propellers, steam and conductors do today. Electronic travel passes are already widespread in many cities. And on June 1st the airline pleted its conversion to electronic tickets, putting yet another nail in the coffin of the paper-based kind. This has been quite an achievement—not least because it pleted in just four years. A task force was set up in 2004 by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), a trade group, to manage the change among the 240 airlines it represents, covering more than 90% of international flights. Tens of thousands of travel agents also had to change their systems. The incentives to move to e-tickets were huge: a paper ticket costs around $10 to process, whereas an e-ticket costs just $1. IATA's member airlines issue more than 400m tickets a year. The association is now trying to turn the mountain of paperwork that panies air freight into electronic form, too. For passengers, lost tickets should e a thing of the past. E-tickets can also be changed more quickly, and they speed up self-service check-in. They can even be delivered to a mobile device in the form of a two-dimensional bar code, a square pattern of dots that can be scanned at the gate and used as a boarding pass. Continental Airlines began testing such a system in Houston in December and is now extending it to Washington National, Newark and Boston's Logan airport. A similar approach enables mobile phones to store tickets for sports fixtures or nightclubs. Where physical tickets do survive, it is likely to be as contactless plastic cards, such as London's Oyster and Hong Kong's Octopus. An even more sophisticated version of this technology will be used to grant access to the opening and closing sessions of the Beijing Olympics. The cards will stor
