Digital ticket

A digital ticket is a virtual instance of a ticket which represents the digitization of rights to claim goods or services.

A digital ticket must fulfill the following criteria:

In addition, another three requirements are also important for digital tickets, they are:

Besides the criteria mentioned above, there are still several features that should be concerned, such as anonymity, transferability and repetitive usability.

The ticket is first issued by the service provider or issuer. The ownership of a ticket may change after it was issued, by transferring the ticket. Either the issuer or owner of ticket might view the status of the ticket. Finally, it is redeemed by the current owner at the service provider.

From creator's point of view, each digital ticket has certain structure, this could be expressed in a multilayer architecture depicted as follows:

Layer 1

Common ticket properties that do not depend on the ticket type:

Layer 2

Layer 3

Depending on the purpose of the ticket, it may be transferred. During the transfer process, the ticket should be visible to both parties involved. After the transfer process is done, the ownership of ticket has changed. The history of transfer should be recorded in either the ticket itself or the central database.

Ability to view the ticket is important to both the service provider and the owner of the ticket. The owner needs to know what his ticket actually is and the service provider needs to verify the ticket during redemption. The view could be achieved by properly designed hardware.

A digital ticket always has certain value that could be redeemed at service provider. Normally after redeeming, the ticket is cleaned. Some tickets work for a period, and will only be deleted after this period. In the special case when the ticket isn't given away after redeeming, it is called a pass.

In order to make an implementation of the digital ticket system, a combination of two paradigms can be used. The first is the account-based system, which relies on central storage and network connections. The second is the smartcard-based system, which uses decentralized storage to store and transfer the ticket.

In an account-based system for tickets, the rights of the tickets are managed in accounts. Ticket changes in accounts can be made by communicating with a so-called account manager through a network. The trust in these systems can be seen from the service provider's and user's perspective, in which the former generally manages the whole system. This leads to an imbalanced trust relationship. Two other disadvantages of these systems are the need for protection of accounts against malicious users and the relatively large efforts that need to be done to store all the accounts for both the users and the service provider.

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Wikipedia