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Information Net and Card for the Adapted Management of European road transport and traffic

Objective

The INCA Project set out to define an architecture for the interchange of transport information between administrations throughout Europe, and to evaluate the proposed architecture, migration strategy and technical components in a series of pilot projects.
The components of the INCA architecture have been tested in a series of pilot projects which use the technology to meet the requirements of current administrations and private users. Where possible industry standards have been used and, for the pilot projects, proven technology has been employed.

The architecture has been designed to incorporate new standards as they become available.

Sectorially, the major achievements of INCA were the analysis of the users' requirements and the establishment of co-operation and concertation with projects in other programmes such as DGVII (Transport), regarding electronic tachographs, and the DRIVE project ADEPT, in which a joint test successfully used INCA smart cards to monitor hazardous goods remotely.
INCA has contributed to the DRIVE activities and to DGVII working groups, thus showing the potential for cross-fertilisation between different EU activities.

Within the telematics area, the INCA project has contributed to the overall objective of the ENS programme by providing and demonstrating an architectural definition of an Open System for interconnecting a broad variety of users in the transport and traffic sector.

INCA wrote the definition of pilot projects to evaluate the architecture components, the architecture and migration path, and implemented a pilot network which links licensing and inspection administrations in six countries.
The INCA architecture is based upon a network connecting licensing administrations with other parties who need to access licensing information, such as inspection authorities and possibly commercial users.

A key objective was to identify legal, organisational, economic and technical constraints in implementing the INCA architecture, and to propose a strategy for implementation. The project also aimed to ensure that the licensing data transferred between administrations by network or read at the roadside from a smart card was compatible.

Further requirements of the administrations were for security, enough flexibility to connect different national infrastructures and cost-effective solutions.

Two types of pilot studies were carried out:

- The network pilot project allowed licensing administrations to exchange information on driver and vehicle licences, primarily for re-registration; it also allowed inspection authorities to check the validity of vehicle and driver licences.
Industry standards (eg EDI/EDIFACT) were used. Security was achieved by using public/private keys to ensure non-repudiation, authenticity (data not tampered with single leaving known source), confidentiality and originality.

- Separate smart card pilot projects tested different uses of the smart card, although all contained the licence data in a standard format compatible with the data exchanged in the pilot network. All pilot projects involved trucks and truck drivers; onboard computers were used when driving hours needed to be written to the cards. Transponders and beacons were used to read information from the cards remotely. Card readers, including hand-held pen-based machines, were used for roadside reading and for analysis of data stored on the cards.

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Coordinator

DCE Nederland BV
Address
Groenenzoem 1
1171 JA Badhoevedorp
Netherlands

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Last update: 2 November 1993

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Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/E2003

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