Group Elephant business Advance enhances South Africa’s ‘PRASA’ metropolitan rail ticketing platform with AI-driven engineering and diagnostics.

As a state-owned enterprise responsible for most passenger rail services in the country, the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) handles approximately 80 million passenger trips annually, with nearly half of those processed through its digital ticketing system. PRASA required a technical partner capable of supporting and scaling its digital ticketing infrastructure while improving operational efficiency. This led to the appointment of Advance to provide AI-enabled development and support services for the metropolitan rail ticketing platform.

Advance has since integrated AI directly into PRASA’s development and operational processes. AI-assisted development tools are applied to rapidly deploy new features, including a nationwide monitoring capability that provides real-time visibility into application health and database connectivity across operating regions. An agentic AI workflow connects coding agents to the ticketing environment through a Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing for AI-based diagnostics, and troubleshooting by accessing system context, documentation and operational rules. Time to identify, investigate and resolve issues has been slashed, with further improvements expected as the AI system grows a knowledge base of past fixes and system behavior patterns.