Abstract

Inland Waterway Transport (IWT) has the potential of moving significant amounts of cargo across the European continent. Similar to the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) initiative in the road sector, River Information Services (RIS) have been created to advance IWT in terms of safety and efficiency of transports by means of telematics, with the ultimate goal to improve its share in multi-modal transport chains. Since the beginning of the creation of RIS within European projects funded in the Framework Programmes (FP) of the European Commission (EC) around the millennium, the EU has been actively supporting the RIS initiative, which led into a European Directive (2005/44/EC) on the implementation of RIS in the member states. Since then the implementation of RIS infrastructure and services has progressed a lot and is heading towards a harmonized implementation in Europe around the year 2020."br" Under the umbrella of e-freight and embedded into multiple FP-funded projects, serious attempts have been made and are still ongoing to progress with the multi-modal exchange of digital transport information for logistics purposes. In line with the Digital Single Market Strategy, the European Commission has launched the DINA (Digital Inland Waterway area) initiative which aims at fostering the digitalisation of logistics information flows in inland navigation."br" The Horizon 2020 (H2020) project “Architecture for EurOpean Logistics Information eXchange” (AEOLIX) started in September 2016 and aims at overcoming the current fragmentation of digital logistics information by creating a neutral platform which allows to connect data streams from different sources and transport modes and provide easy access to the information for logistics players."br" viadonau as the Austrian RIS Provider is actively supporting the DINA initiative and pushing the use of RIS for logistics purposes in order to strengthen the role of IWT in European transport. Within the project AEOLIX, viadonau is actively involved in the “Living Lab Danube” which aims at increasing the use of digital transport information by the stronger use of electronic reporting capabilities and connection with other types of data like vessel position or status of the inland waterway infrastructure."br" Within the AEOLIX Living Lab Danube, digital flows of transport information shall be demonstrated for transports in the Danube corridor between Austria and Romania and fed into the “AEOLIX Platform” which connects digital data streams from various sources and transport modes. It will be investigated under which conditions privacy related information collected by the governmental RIS Providers can be shared within the AEOLIX Ecosystem. Through the involvement of several logistics players, the AEOLIX concept will be evaluated with respect to its maturity and benefit."br" Since the AEOLIX projects will run until mid-2019, it is foreseen to present at the TRA 2018 the current state of play in River Information Services in Europe, their connection to EU regulations and funding instruments as well as inter-mediate results from the AEOLIX Living Lab Danube which will for the first time connect cross-border IWT information directly to an inter-modal data hub for logistics users.