Patent ID: 7143049

Claim:
A method for registering tickets, which comprises: defining a waking zone and associating the waking zone with at least one transceiver unit disposed in the waking zone, the transceiver unit having a transmitting unit; defining a registration zone and associating the registration zone with a registration transceiver unit; providing tickets having: a processor module; a memory module; at least one ticket receiving module; and at least one ticket transceiver module for communicating between the waking zone and the tickets; transmitting, via a near range unidirectional communication, a first information unit from the transmitting unit to a ticket receiving module of a ticket located in the waking zone; intermittently activating, with the processor module, the ticket transceiver module of the ticket located in the waking zone with an item of information contained in the first information unit; at a point in time determined by a beginning of a ticket registration, setting up a higher range bi-directional communication between the registration transceiver unit and a ticket transceiver module of a ticket located in the registration zone through additional information units including second and third information units, and registering a presence of the ticket at least once to establish at least one of a service to be used and a defined presence, wherein the second and third information units include at least information concerning a location of the ticket and at least one of a date and a time; storing the information in at least one of: an area of the memory module of the ticket; and a data bank associated with at least one of the group consisting of an onboard computer, a remote computer system, and the registration transceiver unit; based upon the information concerning the location, transmitting a virtual journey section number in the second information unit to the tickets located in the registration zone and changing the journey section number for each section of a journey by a counting increment; and comparing the journey section number stored on the ticket with a current journey section number to determine if the ticket was correctly registered in previous sections of the journey.