Tickets for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo will be encoded with the latest Radio Frequency Identification technology to make life easier for visitors and organizers. More than 70 million tickets will be issued for the Expo.

The RFID inlay will provide an effective security check by transmitting a unique serial number via radio waves to identify tickets, a little like the transit cards used on the Metro system.

This will be the largest use of the technology for any event in the world. A similar e-ticket system was trialed at the Tennis Masters Cup in Shanghai this month.

Officials with the Shanghai Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision have set standards for the new tickets and the standards will be implemented from February 1 next year.

The standards include requirements for the tickets so that they can withstand temperature changes, soakings and wrinkling. Anti-counterfeiting techniques are also part of the standards.

The Bureau of Shanghai World Expo Coordination officials said the tickets injected with RFID technology were significant because 6.2 billion yuan (US$908 million) was expected to be raised in ticket sales which would contribute to the 10.6-billion-yuan operational expenses.

A secure ticketing system is vital for the event.

The ticket standards were applied for the e-ticketing system used at the Tennis Masters Cup where 100,000 tickets were issued and 78,000 were put into use. Of the 78,000 tickets, only 62 were invalid - a failure rate of 0.008 percent far below the 0.05 percent that the standard demands.

The Masters Cup system detected and blocked 2,500 fake tickets during the event.

"Being anti-static and free from other electromagnetic interferences, the tickets are more than just a pass," said Wang Jiazhen, a senior engineer from the Shanghai Institute of Standardization. "Developed by local companies and institutions, the system has independent intellectual property rights and will be used for many more large public events in the future."

The date when the Expo tickets go on sale has yet to be announced.

(Shanghai Daily November 27, 2008)