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Content archived on 2022-12-23

INLAND NAVIGATION TELEMATICS

Objective

INVITE aims to investigate the problems related to the inland waterways in a pan-European scale and to provide a harmonised approach to a telematic networking of commercial and administrative users in this field.

In order to compete successfully with other transport modes, inland navigation companies and ship owners must be able to offer just-in-time services and to guarantee its reliable performance in practice. For example, existing transport capacities should be better utilised and transport costs should be reduced. Therefore, information systems and communications (ship to shore and vice-versa, port to port, etc...) within Europe including the Central and Easter, European Countries is one of the major objectives of this project. INVITE is approaching some of the major problems in this field by investigating a distributed network concept to link the ships, the private companies and the inland waterway ports on a standardised system. Interfaces of the proposed system will be extended to connecting the rail, road and sea ports communication infrastructure (existing and future) to the proposed approach.

Inland waterways in Europe can provide a major alternative scenario to the various problems of transport, especially by road and its high environmental impacts. Eastern European Countries, also involved in the development of their waterways for transport purposes are facing more acute problems based on the known economic conditions and of course the low developed infrastructure. On one hand it is not essential but mandatory, based on the mobility White paper by the Commission that developments in this area should continue at a higher speed and level. On the other hand economic development and growth in the Central and Eastern European Countries is hampered because of transport related problems.

The growing concerns of inland waterways participants can be outlined as below:
low infrastructure on inland harbours - improvements on the vessels - information systems - communication (ship to shore and vice versa) especially in Eastern countries - demand and supply as a percent of the overall transport chain - major price differences between Eastern European and Western European inland waterway operators - proper interfaces to rail/road in the inland harbours (multimodal and intermodal approaches) - new designs (cost efficient).

The above problems indicate the present state of the knowledge of this research segment of work. The current proposal has identified the following areas of work:
pan-European open system architecture - communications (terrestrial and non terrestrial) - effective inland waterway operations - safe operations with a focus to dangerous goods - awareness to the Central and Eastern European Countries of the new developments within the European Union.
where substantial investment is not needed and the overall cost-benefit to the users (commercial and administrations) may provide a high rate.

Topic(s)

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Call for proposal

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Coordinator

IMPETUS CONSULTANTS LTD
EU contribution
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Address
Syngrou avenue, 9
11743 Athens
Greece

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Total cost
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Participants (5)