Maritime transport stakeholders gathered yesterday and today in Brussels to discuss the development of e-Maritime, both in terms of policy and technology. The e-Maritime conference is organised by the European Commission and is being attended by more than 250 participants. At the first day of the conference , keynote speakers, senior policy makers and industry practitioners contributed in setting the scene and understanding the background to the ‘e-Maritime story’, as well as exploring key issues and new challenges.
Txaber Goiri (photo), Chairman of the ESPO Intermodal Transport and Logistics Committee, presented the ESPO view on e-Maritime. “We welcome the Commission’s initiative”, Mr Goiri said, “European port authorities see e-Maritime as an opportunity towards setting the requirements for an efficient system that would facilitate procedures and information exchange in port areas and the logistic chain”.
There are mainly two concrete ongoing initiatives that form the basis for e-Maritime, notably the implementation of the Ship Reporting Formalities Directive and the ongoing work on improving SafeSeaNet (SSN). ESPO welcomes the progress that the expert group on the implementation of the Ship Reporting Formalities Directive made on the definition of national Single Windows. The concept now offers the flexibility to Member States to integrate already existing port systems within the national system, if they wish to do so. ESPO now urges national administrations to maintain and integrate existing port community systems as entry points within the national Single Windows. Regarding SafeSeaNet, ESPO underlined that the system only has limited value for ports for the time being. This is mainly due to the fact that ports are data providers within SSN without always having access to information. Such access is nevertheless a requirement under the Community Vessel Traffic Monitoring and Information Systems Directive. In addition, ports that do have access to SSN report data inaccuracies. This raises the issue of reliability and responsibility of the SSN data. Once accessible and reliable, SSN data may be useful for ports as complementing data information exchange from existing port systems.
The conference continues today with the active involvement of participants in working groups, discussing the use of new technologies to facilitate ship and port operations and multimodality.
Source: ESPO (European Sea Ports Organisation)